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Copper Thieves Jeopardize US Infrastructure
coondoggie supplies an excerpt from Network World that might make you consider a lock for your pipes: "The FBI today ratcheted up the clamor to do something more substantive about the monumental growth of copper theft in the US. In a report issued today the FBI said the rising theft of the metal is threatening the critical infrastructure by targeting electrical substations, cellular towers, telephone land lines, railroads, water wells, construction sites, and vacant homes for lucrative profits. Copper thefts from these targets have increased since 2006; and they are currently disrupting the flow of electricity, telecommunications, transportation, water supply, heating, and security and emergency services, and present a risk to both public safety and national security." (A July, 2006 post on Ethan Zuckerman's blog gives an idea of how widespread cable theft has affected internet infrastructure, and basketmaking, in Africa.)
If you had to be an official 'something' or licensed...that would stop a lot of criminals I'd think?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
My housemate works in an accident and emergency operating theater. They had some guy in the other night who was stealing copper from a substation. His tools of choice? Axe and a kitchen knife with an uninsulated handle. Apparently he looked a bit like a pretzel.
"Physics is to math as sex is to masturbation." -R. Feynman
A friend's parents had passed away, and the house was up for sale. She went over to just do a checkup and noticed it was very cold in the house, however the thermostat was set to 50 (house has radiators). She also noticed no water coming form the faucet. She went into the basement - someone had broken in through a window well and cut out every single pipe in the basement. All the plumbing for the radiators and water supply were all gone.
It's a huge problem in the mining industry as well. Cables that cost thousands of dollars are stolen, stripped, and sold to recycling centers.
The fucked up political-economic system gives them a motive. Everything else is inevitable from that point.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
This is a huge problem here in Vancouver, Canada. One solution that has been bandied around is requiring the scrap dealers to not pay cash - i.e. if you have copper to sell you get a receipt from the scrap dealer, provide your name & address and in 30 days the dealer mails you a cheque. As most junkies don't have addresses, nor are they prepared to wait 30 days, they'll stop selling copper. The legitimate sellers don't mind waiting 30 days.
Old news. Price of scrap has bottomed out in the past few months. Most scrapyards around here won't even cut a check if you bring in less than $10 worth of scrap... which is a lot of copper these days.
As an anecdote, there was a construction site we were working on where the plumbers painted all the copper pipes black, to make them look like steel pipes, to thwart would-be thieves during construction where access to the building is very easy.
...everywhere. On the chip level, even, like that prototype I saw a while back.
Muhuhahahahaha! And then, I, Electro-light-monster-villian, will finally complete my diabolical plan!
It is by my will alone my thoughts acquire motion; it is by the juice of the coffee bean that the thoughts acquire speed
This is one problem I figured the current administration had fixed.
http://www.kitcometals.com/charts/copper_historical_large.html#6months
Tank the housing market, and copper isn't needed, the price falls, not worth steeling.
But thieves are apparently slow learners.
Just charge up _all_ the copper to at least 50KV. Copper theft will become self-punishing. However, taking a shower will get quite risky.
I love it when AC's run around insulting countries. These aren't poor and homeless people stealing copper, these are career criminals or bored teens and twenty-somethings just looking for some extra money and something to do.
"A claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers." Hayek
This is due to the difference in income status between the rich and the poor in the US. The rich need the valuable infrastructure. The poor just need to live.
Absolute rubbish. The US is far from the Paris depicted in "Les Miserables", where the poor have to steal to live. These people are doing it because they think it will put them on the fast track to make them rich. Having an LCD television or supporting a drug habit is not "needing to live".
To think I almost cried at the plight of the "poor" in America after reading your post. NOT. I live in the REAL 3rd world, and I see REAL poverty every day.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
If it's not whitehouse.GOV, then DON'T CLICK IT!
When I was stationed in Balad, Iraq I volunteered at the base hospital. We mostly just helped unload the choppers and what not, sometimes walk around and chat with the patients. Balad was the biggest hospital in theatre so the worst cases eventually made their way there for stabilization before being sent to Germany or sent home (in the case of Iraqis).
Anyways, I must have seen one or two patients a week come in with severe electrical burns from trying to steal copper wire, most of the time it was kids.
So its not ALWAYS some idiot out to make a quick buck...people can just get desperate.
First it's Bittorrent. Now it's copper thieves...
What's next, Zebras?!
thieves have been stealing the aluminum guard rails, hand rails and brackets off of bridges and overpasses here. Apparently they grab them one or two at a time, and it takes a week or two before they've removed enough that someone notices the missing rails. The aluminum has been found at scrap dealers, cut up into small enough pieces so it's not (easily) identifiable as it's original form.
The price of copper has tanked along with the rest of the world economy. It is now down to around $1.50/lb. The article would have been more timely 6 months ago.
http://www.metalprices.com/FreeSite/metals/cu/cu.asp
The utter selfishness of what the thieves do is mind-boggling.
I'm not entirely against trading their haul of copper for a small quantity of lead.
The price of copper went to unprecedented levels recently (upwards of $4 a pound) and that drove a lot of the theft. In that last few months prices have returned to normal, and I would expect to see theft decrease as well. Of course with the economy tanking, and more jobless, the theft reduction from lower prices may be offset.
http://www.bloggingstocks.com/2008/12/03/freeport-suspends-dividend-cuts-production-on-lower-demand-pri/
Someone missed the boat here. The price of copper has collapsed from $4/lb to $1.65/lb over the last three months or so. This problem will go away overnight.
Why not? We blame the existence of Piratebay on big companies. What's one more excuse on the road to hell?
Hey, this is the free market at work! Why is everyone upset about this? If it wasn't for government regulation we wouldn't have this problem! And now our godless heathen communist government wants to arrest people for simply trying to put those goods back into production? How shameful -- these "criminals" are really the unsung heroes of these regulated markets.
.
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warning: contains sarcasm.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Guy I know at work in the UK used to work installing cables for new power stations back in the 70's. Tells a great story about a cable they were installing underground to link the turbine hall with the substation.
This cable was about 2 feet diameter and a couple of hundred metres long, and was installed with 2 or 3 meter tails sticking out at either end. Night after the cable was installed, they all came back and cut the tails about a meter below ground level, pulled the rest and made a VERY tidy sum selling it to a scrapyard. 3 months later when the station is due to be connected, guys turn up to wire the tails and find the cable missing. Hilarity ensues.
In South Africa, copper is stolen on a massive scale, helped by the many black outs. When lack outs are scheduld the copper thieves can even plan their activities.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Imposition of the death penalty to those caught red-handed would do a lot in stemming the theft of copper in our critical infrastructure.
I second this approach if it can be proven that lives of law abiding Americans were put in danger at any moment during or after the theft.
This approach works in China so I believe it would do likewise in these United States of America.
A quick glance shows that copper prices have plummeted around 60% over the past 6 months. I'm by no means an expert, but it looks to me like copper has had it's 'bubble', and will now go back to being a normal commodity. The days when stealing copper was profitable are over for the time being.
A number of companies here in the US pacific northwest put names or serial numbers on their copper they put in place. So when the thieves show up to collect they give a call to the company listed to ask if it is on the up and up.
Then of course there are the brainiacs that broke into a power substation to steal copper. They took out their bolt cutters, and BAM, power out for a few blocks and more person up for a darwin award.
Native American Indian muttering "buddy, what's a few kilometres of copper?
Well Native Americans ARE American, so chances are slim to none that they'd be speaking in metric, much less using the metres spelling instead of meters :).
That aside though, the Native Americans are one of countless groups in the past who got thrown off of land by another force. It's happened so many times over throughout history that I fail to even see why so much special attention is attributed there.
And this post is brought to you by a 1/8th Cherokee (though I figure I'm still a lot more white than native american) American citizen.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
I just went through a process of buying a house. I limited myself to $50k cash total with the intent of doing most of the repairs myself. This limited me to HUD and foreclosures. One thing that was a common denominator of all houses listed by HUD was every piece of copper; AC unit, water heater, pipes, fixtures, and electric wires, were completely striped. I was amazed at the efficiency of many of the robberies. Only a few had holes punched randomly in the walls like someone searching for cable and pipes. The vast majority looked as if someone took the time to walk through the house with a metal detector and surgically removed everything. It made me wonder if someone did just watch for houses to hit the HUD list then rob them.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
As long as its more profitable and accessible than the other job / social security alternatives then I reckon people will keep doing it.
Building sites with lots of copper + access to a vehicle = easy money. How long does it take to lift 100lb of copper into a vehicle? Less than an hour I'd say. So even at 1 dollar / lb it's looking attractive. For some folk, 100 dollars for an hour's work is nice money...
just don't use a lock made of copper!
Those of us who think they know everything annoy those of us who do.
I just moved into a brand new house last month I had built for me. The pipes in the wall aren't copper... they're PVC, with some kind of transparent rubber tubes connecting them to the fixtures.
At my last job, we had two occurrences of copper theft. The first was some people took some extra pipes on the outside of the building. A few weeks later someone tried to take another pipe, but that was the water main. Nobody was caught, but we didn't have water that day. Everyone had to go across the street to use a restroom, and it just had to be the day I had a nasty hangover and I was really thirsty.
"US has now entered 3rd world nation status. Where individuals are so poor that ripping up and selling the vital infrastructure becomes a useful business."
Copper is easy to harvest and pays well when scrapped. Scrapping metal generally has been profitable in recent years, and that has everything to do with developing nations like China BUYING scrap as opposed to any US decline.
Aluminum gets less press but also pays well, often ten or twelve bucks per automobile wheel.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
We need more incidents like these.
The site was clearly labeled with electrical warning signs, yet the idiot still went ahead with attempting to steal the wiring. Long story short, he probably will pay a little more attention to signs...
My dad worked at an RCA location in scenic Gibbsboro, New Jersey in the 70's. They made television transmitter antennas there, and decided to put up a chain link fence around the place. One weekend, the fence was stolen.
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, someone stole a security fence.
Tony Soprano bought his kids Nikes with that. Except, in my neck of the woods, the family was called "Forte."
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Nothing new about people stealing copper and other metals.
Heck, I recall back 20 years ago reading an article in my local small city newspaper about a guy being electrocuted trying to take down a seemingly abandoned looking powerline in a deeply wooded area that turned out to be live; the ultimate punishment for theft.
The drug war has continued to esculate, and is the main driving force, made worse by the economic downturn, for the increase in such metal thefts.
Decriminalizing / legalizing drugs, along with medical treatment would go a long way towards reducing the despiration tactics many drug addicts resort to for their next "high".
On a related topic, I live near Philadelphia - it's been widely in the news lately that city is going to cut 11 libraries and close most all of the swimming pools for a total combined savings of several million...
And yet, at the same time, it appears they continue to fight the drug war along with most all other cities at ever increasing expense; often little to no discussion of cutting jails and prisons - often the exact opposite, even in the bad economic times.
Rambling on, but again, in the view of many, the drug war is the driving force for much of the property crime, such as metal theft.
Ron
CThey are performing acts of sabotage which undermines the security of the nation & peoples trust in the government.
True, but unless the main purpose of their activity is to cause terror, they technically aren't 'terrorists'. I'm pretty sure sabotage is illegal already (at least it should be), and I know theft is. We don't need to change any laws to prosecute them.
ignore parent, some guy spamming a lame ebay auction, nothing to do with article.
And as you tread the halls of sanity, You feel so glad to be, Unable to go beyond. I have a message, From another time..
A simple answer: Go fuck yourself. Terrorists? Really? So you're saying they're doing this to scare the populace into some form of thinking or to change their ways? You're a god damned idiot.
Seriously, an IDIOT. I don't care if this comes off as flamebait. Calling a spade a spade.
So, you could theoretically be more wrong, but it would take a good chunk of effort.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Copper price might have something to do with the increase in theft. It was about 4$/LB from Dec 2005 to Sept 2008. Now is only 1.5 $/LB. Of course the profit for the thieves is still 100% but they get less money for the same risk.
that's the choke point
you're not going to stop heroin junkies, you're not going to secure theft sites
scrap dealers need to be bound up in red tape, and then scrap dealers who skirt the ordinances must be dealt with harshly. you don't have to worry about international or interstate transport, as you are going to destroy your profit margin on what usually amounts to less than $100 for a lot of heavy metal, and you are not usually dealing with criminal masterminds here who would exert the effort. nor do they have the resources to melt it down themselves
the scrap dealer is the point at which illegal goods get turned into legal goods and profit. scrap dealers therefore are going to have to be tied up in laws and regulations in order to stop this trade, and watched like hawks. chain of custody regulations must be put in place: if you use a bunch of metal, you have to produce paperwork detaling where it came from
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Most of the copper thieves here in Southern California are illegal immigrants. They steal copper because they can make lots of money without requiring any work permits.
New laws are coming into effect that will require thumb prints from all copper sellers; however, I worry what effect this will have on the illegal immigrant population, many of whom rely upon selling copper to make ends meet.
Imagine if US's government was in charge of Africa. Here come the basketweaver bailouts & the copper czars.
Fucking lowlifes. We are finally buckling and renting out the house we haven't been able to sell in Montgomery, Alabama (1000 miles from where we live now) partly because the extra mortgage is hurting, but the fact that there is so much crime in Montgomery and we have no one guarding our copper is honestly the biggest problem in my mind. People break in, do many thousands worth of dollars of damage to make a couple hundred bucks, and in turn buy drugs to make themselves even more worthless.
Whale
Copper theft in Soviet Russia (well, actually, also in Ukraine and Belarus) made neighbour Estonia major exporter of color metals back in 90.
the recession just knocked the bottom out from under the copper market. copper stocks, mining companies and futures are all way down lately and so bad they made the news today.
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, someone stole a security fence.
Sure, I know it's not real irony, but goddamn it, that's ironic.
-l
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I didn't know there was a "-1 Disagree" option.
Last I heard, the slow down in the US means Chinese smelts are walking away from contracts. There's tens of thousands of tons of scrap metal sitting in docks in China.
Spelling and Grammar errors have been added to this post for your enjoyment
This was a problem when copper prices were high. This is no longer the case.
http://www.kitcometals.com/charts/copper_historical_large.html#5years
In Chandler, AZ park lights have had the wire removed for miles. The problem is that it cannot be stopped by law enforcement, which means it pretty much cannot be stopped at all.
Someone sees some wire, they take the wire and get cash. Nobody wants to infringe upon the rights of the scrap dealers, so accepting of wire from just about anyone is going to continue. We now have people that in order to buy their next HD TV are ripping out the wires to street lights, homes, and anywhere else that wire can be obtained.
It is an easy way to get cash with very limited risks.
With all this missing copper the NSA can't spy effectively enough.
Lock up these terrorists!
..."currently disrupting the flow of electricity"
MOD parent up. In US urban areas, a lot of this activity is done by drug addicts. This is more of a sign of the break down in community vs. individualistic values than a sign of income disparities.
In my job we lost 1 week of Internet connection when some guys stole the cable that connect us to the telefone co. a few hundred meters line. The zone was kinda dangerous, for obvious reasons, so the co. took more time than what they shuld. This happend 5 years ago, in Uruguay and the sensation was like, man this is so 3erd. world stuff, guess we where only advanced in the matter! :) :P
Now we have a fiber connection, but we still fear some dumb thief whill cut it thinking its still copper
Better leave those barrel makers alone!
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
The fences aren't made from real iron? What are they made from?
Also, that's a perfect example of irony: your efforts to reduce loss form theft lead directly to increased loss from theft. Doncha think?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
What? Bored teens? What do you base this on? You should check out:
http://www.sweet-juniper.com/
He takes lots of photos of abandoned buildings in Detroit, and he makes it sound like the people stealing the copper are poor and homeless.
Why exactly would bored teenagers be risking death and the amount of work it takes to saw through pipes for a few bucks? Did you do manual labor because you were bored as a teenager?
Incorrect- they're mainly meth-heads looking for a way to pay for their next hit. Anyway, no career criminal or bored teen would steal copper from the lights in the MAX tunnel- anybody with a mind not influenced by drugs finds 44 ton trains moving at 55 mph to be kind of scary.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
The way to stop this is to discourage the only two parties that profit from this: the thieves and the scrap dealers.
1) Discouraging thieves: A theft of copper needs to be planned. At very least, the thief needs a saw and must acquire this in advance. This fact means harsher penalties are unlikely to effectively discourage theft, as people who plan to break the law very rarely plan on getting caught. Harsher penalties will simply cause them to run faster, fight harder or fight more violently when caught. So, the theft cannot be prevents by simple changes to the penalty. The reward for the theft must then be targeted. Making it difficult for a person to sell copper (or other metal) at will and/or anonymously will discourage copper theft, as most thieves are not looking to identify themselves or wait for a profit.
2) Discouraging dealers: Dealers have more to lose for disobeying the law. They have an established place inside the system and loss of that place (eg: revocation of business license) is a penalty far beyond any personal penalty the owner of the dealership itself may face (eg: jail time). The dealers of scrap metal are also the enablers of scrap metal theft. Without them, the thief has no place to sell his take. The solution to scrap metal theft therefore must involve the scrap metal dealers and, because they are invested in the system, scrap metal dealers can be relied upon (to one degree or another) to willfully comply with this solution.
Given the above, a solution likely to decrease scrap metal theft is to require dealers to take clear photographs of everyone who sells metal (trivial, given today's technology), require government ID to be photocopied for all scrap metal sales (also trivial) and require scrap metal dealers to hold payment on scrap metal sales for thirty days or more (again, trivial). This identifies the thief (by photograph at least) and delays the reward, discouraging thieves.
Who is John Galt?
This holds true until BigGovt(tm) life in mother's basement impossible.
Submission as evidence constitutes plaintiff and/or prosecutorial misconduct.
As we're condemning these thieves for being fucking assholes, tearing down their own community's infrastructure for the scrap value, just remember that the only difference between them and the financial wizards and CEO's who brought us into our current crisis is a matter of scale.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
My father is in real estate and has seen an increasing number of homes gutted of their copper, particularly those acquired by banks which have been left vacant. And they really demolish the interiors these homes trying to get at any bit of copper. You can only imagine what that does to property values, but it also has opened up the potential for great investment opportunities.
And of course, the ridiculous thing is that for all the work they put into stripping the copper they don't earn all that much for it. They'd earn more taking a job at a fast food restaurant. But I suppose if they weren't so stupid they wouldn't be committing crime anyway. It's pathetic.
What I really love are the jokers who cut or break the catalytic converters off of cars (most often SUVs or trucks, more clearance to work) in the hope of recovering the small amount of platinum they contain. Platinum is considerably more scarce than copper, and they keep finding new (ab)uses for it to make it even more scarce.
I guess you could call all this theft "pre-cycling"? *snicker*
Well, if the anti-gun lobby would stop artificially inflating the price of copper in order to force the price of brass and by result the price of brass casings and ammo up, then this would not be happening. The price of copper is not being set my free market forces. It's being jacked up by artificial means in order to produce another effect.
Commodity markets are down and the scrap yards are taking less/paying less - so less incentive to steal copper/aluminum/etc.
Economy is just correcting itself. No regulation required.
Years ago, a friend told me that copper theft was such a problem in Pakistan that his employer tired of having to regularly replace segments of their site's high speed data line and replaced it with a microwave relay system. The thieves would just pull one end of the cable down from the telephone pole and attach it to a truck, and then drive down the road, stripping the cable from the poles. Local law enforcement was useless.
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As is common, the government (i.e., FBI) is behind the curve.
Copper price chart at http://stockcharts.com/h-sc/ui?s=%24copper
This report comes just as copper prices are plummeting due to the worldwide recession, which should reduce the problem significantly. Prices have dropped 60% since spring.
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Stop bitching. Bring back hard time in the form of back breaking labor. Bring back public flogging. Bring back hanging. Problem solved.
Humanity's desire to overvalue human life is going to be the death of society as we know it, if not our species itself.
I mean hea, our pennies are made of [copper] right?
Not really. Since 1982, US pennies have been 97.5% zinc, with a copper coating.
-kgj
Well, since the USA was built on stealing land from the Injuns, labor via slaves from Africa, oil from Iraq (and Injuns living in Oklahoma in the 1920's), rocket technology from Germany, why should we be surprised when its inhabitants decide to follow in the old fashioned traditions. /. 's aren't that surprised. Explaining it this to most patitiots is another matter.
But I guess most
For more info, read "War is a Racket" by Smedley Butler!
Seems someone didn't get the memo: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/industry/mining/3543370/Metal-prices-fall-further-than-during-Great-Depression.html
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Here in Canada, I've notice that newly constructed homes are build using polyeth tube en lieu of Cu. Anyone know if any houses in the USA are plumbed with polyeth?
How do you lock up power lines? How do you prevent(other than accidental electricution) thieves when they climb your 10' fence topped with barbed wire to get at the copper in the substation?
How effective are locks when they're breaking into unoccupied buildings to steal the copper wire and the very fixtures out of the house? Buildings under construction are popular targets.
How effectively can you lock up your Air conditioner? Thieves are ripping up rooftop units to get at the copper used in the piping.
Heck, I've even heard of the theives cutting catalytic converters off of cars in long term lots because there's valuable metals inside.
I don't read AC A human right
The Liberty Bell has copper in it. This can only mean one thing:
They're stealing copper because they hate our freedoms!
In response, Duracell has introduced a product line called the "freedom top".
"Copper thefts from these targets have increased since 2006" -- because the price of copper jumped from ~$1.5/lb in 2005 to ~$3/lb in 2006, and even increased a bit more in 2007. Now it's back to 2005 level at $1.5/lb. Problem solved.
The war on copper terrorists.
It's probably overkill,
1. Overkill - many people only sell occasionally.
2. No PO Box? I live out in the boonies, I don't have house delivery - I get my mail by stopping off at the post office.
3. Many people, like my grandfather, only sell metal a couple times a year.
4. At least make it store hours so people can sell their cans back without taking time off.
5. Sounds good
6. Sounds like pawn shop rules - not necessarily a bad idea.
The goal, of course, isn't necessarily to entirely prevent the sale of stolen metals - but as you mention, add some hoops to slow it down/increase the odds of the perp getting caught.
I don't read AC A human right
Anyone wanna buy some copper?
I say use metallic sodium. Cheap, conductive, and resistant to theft.
"Guys are akin to organized crime in some areas, they work in little teams and do that kinda stuff if you stop them from taking what they think is theirs."
That reminds me. I got to go download something.
Remember that vaccine for crack addition? Well just get rid of the number of people who need a quick buck for a quick fix.
An old lady down the road from me passed away a few months ago. Her 1920's vintage house was vacant.
Someone broke in and stole ALL the copper water pipes. You think I would have noticed - it would take a truck and quite a bit of noise to remove them.
Somewhere within a one hundred mile radius is a metal recycler that is happy to look the other way.
Physical punishment would go a long way in stopping this crap. When it goes from costing a few people some money to threatening our entire society, it's time to up the ante.
Go read that basket article, read the comments towards the bottom. Nevermind that it doesn't exactly make a whole lot of sense to steal infrastructure to make baskets instead of selling it for scrap, the author really does put out some fairly harmful disinformation by making that accusation. Most of the weavers purchase their wire, and most of the wire isn't even copper anymore because it costs too much. Which goes back to copper theives are going to scrap it, not make baskets.
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
Think of it from china's POV:
- buy available copper
- cause foreign market prices to soar
- let foreign thieves destroy enemy power bases from the inside
- profit!
best of all there's no international broo ha ha about china playing unfairly.
Including this genius, who was trying to steal ground wires in an electrical substation.
WARNING:Don't view while eating--Gruesome images!
http://www.electricalknowledge.com/images/HiVoltageShock.pps
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I thought just this week there was news that copper, along with lead and zinc, had sunk to significant lows. The percent decline in non-precious metals is supposed to be greater than that of the Great Depression 1928 thru 1932. If this is true then where is the market for it?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
What a strange article to appear now, as current copper prices are at depression levels. It's cheaper to buy-honest than to steal! Sounds like FUD, but who's got the anti-copper agenda ? Who currently is pushing last-mile-fibre ??
Sounds like something out of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged where Ragnar DanneskjÃld cuts off the copper supply to the US through piracy on international waters. This resulted in a copper shortage which greatly increased the chaos of the "mindless" world which John Galt planned to create showing the world what would happen if the "prime-movers" of the world were to vanish.
Every time I've sold scrap metal they have always asked for my drivers liscense and taken my liscense plate number. $500,000 worth of copper doesn't just disappear and would certainly be a huge deal for any buyer. Some could be convinced to cooperate even if they knew the seller was shady. A clever police detective could examine records from nearby buyers to locate missing metal.
I live in Rhode Island, where we have the highest national unemployment rate in the U.S., needless to say, we have a -ton- of foreclosures.
We also saw most of our urban houses built between 1900 and 1960, so there's not a lot of PVC pipes around here.
One of my coworkers is looking for a house now that he's established and houses are cheap. He has looked at 25 houses, and only five had pipes in them.
The big problem is that if a house doesn't have any pipes in it, you can't just move in, set up camp, and start fixing it up; you have to outlay a tremendous amount of capital just to have a toilet, sink, bath, and heat. Houses might be 'cheap' here now, but a stripped house is far too pricey to get involved with unless you have gobs of cash to throw around.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
Electrify the everloving fuck out of it, to nab those who try to steal it. (or at least their ashes)
Keep it away from squirrels though.
Copper is in demand because it has a lot of uses. SOME of those uses can be replaced by other metals, such as aluminum. One of the biggest uses is in wiring for residential/commercial construction. They used to allow aluminum wiring, but dropped it when fires could be traced to it --aluminum is softer than copper, when screwed down in an electrical connection, the metal tends to flow, so the connection loosens, and sparks start happening. If you have aluminum wiring in your house, you need to have the electrical connections re-tightened annually. However, if they could devise a generic and simple solution to that problem, then they could start using aluminum wiring again, the demand for copper would go down, and therefore the price would go down along with the incentive to steal. One possibility for a better aluminum connector involves a double-crimp. In-between the two crimps, the metal can't flow anywhere and would stay solidly in contact with the exterior harder-metal tube (usually a copper-aluminum alloy) that had been crimped onto the wire.
I know this. I was just saying that's the "common knowledge".
... which I've proven to my own satisfaction is (a) sometimes accurate, (b) sometimes inaccurate, (c) sometimes wildly inaccurate.
Sorry, I missed the irony in your post.
Maybe the zinc penny isn't common knowledge, I dunno. I assumed that it is (I read about it back in the eighties).
But I haven't read any surveys, haven't done or read any research on the subject. (Furthermore, I'm inclined to treat surveys with cautious skepticism.)
All I've really got to go on is my own intuition
-kgj
First off, let me say (liberal alert) that eliminating the War on Drugs will cause crime, including copper theft, to plummet. When a $100 daily meth habit turns into $1 daily, they'll be able to fund their habits by grabbing dropped change off the ground outside the McDonald's drive-through window.
I've thought about copper theft at my house, and I'm somewhat secured against it. My neighborhood's utilities are all underground, and the only AC wiring outside my house is a about 6' of EMT from the ground to the meter. I have a plastic XM antenna too, but that's not exactly a hot item at scrapyards. I keep the crawlspace door locked, and it has a contact to the burglar alarm, so no going down there and stealing pipes, wires, or the water heater.
That leaves the air conditioning compressor: someone could turn off the [NEC required] disconnect switch, cut the wire and pipes, and cart it off on a heavy dolly.
I've considered connecting my compressor to the burglar alarm: 2-conductor wire with tamper switches on the cover and bottom. Taking the compressor apart, lifting it off the ground, and cutting the wire would trigger an alarm.
I'll probably do it if/when copper theft becomes a daily problem at homes. It currently only seems to happen at construction sites around here.
I upgraded my copper plumbing and installed PVC everywhere I could. Then I asked my electrician to upgrade my copper wiring to PVC, and the bastard refused.
Them electricians are in league with the copper lobbies, I tall you. I hope they'll make a Federal law to mandate PVC wires!
Fantasy: http://ferrisfantasy.blogspot.com/
Gold: ~$750 per troy ounce
Silver: ~$10 per troy ounce
Nickel: ~$0.30 per troy ounce
Copper: ~$0.10 per troy ounce
Lead: ~$0.03 per troy ounce
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
This is a symptom of a more general problem: there are more people than the resources necessary to support them. If there were plenty of copper, this would not be a problem. But we need lots of it, and we don't have lots of it, so the price rises, and the incentive to steal rises. We will see the same thing with wood, potable water, topsoil, ..., in our lifetimes.
The ultimate solution, obviously, is to remember that the planet really can't support 7 billion people who all want to use copper or air, and that we need to figure out how to build a sustainable society in which we have enough resources to go around.
Or die.
"The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place."
Sounds like something out of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged where Ragnar Danneskjold cuts off the copper supply to the US through piracy on international waters. This resulted in a copper shortage which greatly increased the chaos of the "mindless" world which John Galt planned to create showing the world what would happen if the "prime-movers" of the world were to vanish.
I hope this forces shitty DSL companies into switching to fiber so I can finally get a fast connection.
So, you could theoretically be more wrong, but it would take a good chunk of effort.
Nah, it's easy to be much more wrong. A better line would be "you couldn't be more wrong without creation science".
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The FBI report cites thefts that happened in April. In April copper was going for $4/lb. Since then we've had the biggest deflation since the great depression, and in that time metal prices have fallen MORE than during the great depression.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/industry/mining/3543370/Metal-prices-fall-further-than-during-Great-Depression.html
Today copper closed at about $1.55/lb. That's roughly what aluminum was going for in April. (Aluminum is now $0.71/lb)
http://www.kitcometals.com/charts/copper_historical.html
So their statement that "copper prices from 2001 to 2008 have increased by 500%" is no longer even close to the truth. Right now it's closer to 50%, and it still looks to be falling.
By in large a majority of the American people can not answer the following questions ...
I take your point. I'm told that there are people who are proud that they're not educated. (I haven't met them, but I have it on good authority.)
-kgj
Heh. That's not really gruesome, you know. There's a lot uglier in your average trauma center.
Most copper looks like one of two things - pipes of a few standard diameters, or wires of a few standard gauges. A pile of M pieces of N-foot lengths of 1-inch pipe looks the same whether you just bought it or stole it from somebody, and if you're dealing with obviously-used pipe, you can chop it up into different lengths than the original (assuming you didn't already do that as part of the process of ripping it out of the house...) No foundry required.
If copper wire dealers wanted to get fancy, they could put serial numbers on wire reels, to make it a little less untraceable when you're selling "some wire left over from a building job", but they're not going to serialize the wire. I suppose a contractor could randomly spraypaint the stuff when installing it, which'd at least make it look obviously used, but again, a foundry isn't needed.
And you can always let the stuff hang around in your garage or your cousin's junkyard for a few months if you need to anonymize it a bit more, though that's more of a trick for professional thieves than amateur meth-heads.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
This is more of a sign of the break down in community vs. individualistic values than a sign of income disparities.
At first glance, I agree with you.
On reflection -- thinking like an anthropologist, here -- I wonder if the breakdown of community values into individualistic values tends to parallel the breakdown from richer to poorer.
Reasoning: members of a community are more likely to create and accumulate wealth than loners. I'm speaking here of the long run (discounting short-run loner wealth, e.g. lottery, bank robbery, etc.).
Seen in this light, the breakdown of community values into lone wolf values would be accompanied by reduced accumulation of wealth.
This is speculation based on intuition; I have no evidence or authorities to back this up. I should mention that I'm not an anthropologist, although anthropology does run in the family.
I'm thinking (extreme analogy here) of how Peter Farb, in his excellent Man's Rise to Civilization, explains the near-universal taboo on incest. In brief, Farb argues that cultures which permit incest tend to be endogamous (marrying within the group), whereas the incest taboo necessitates exogamy (marrying outside the group). Exogamous cultures are better able to generate and accumulate wealth, therefore they out-compete endogamous cultures; in time, endogamous cultures disappear (or sink into an ugly criminal underground).
-kgj
supporting a drug habit is not "needing to live".
try telling that to a drug addict.
Becasue that person can not get a job, even though they can function perfectly well during work.
Plus when addicted you really feel you need it to live. Not, man, I would really love a hit! but the viseral feeling that you life depends on it, and since you can work, you are going to steal. Some drugs can make your body put desiring that drug above eating and drinking.
No it's not right, but I want to put into perspective the addicts POV.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I would say it's more of a sign of the flourishing drug trade. I guess the black CIA ops need to be financed somehow. Not like this hasn't been done many times before. We've even had 2 CIA planes down with 5 tons of cocaine on board, and no proper investigations thanks to government links. This is what you get when CIA and Pentagon get too powerful.
[No Carrier]
Have gnu, will travel.
Ignore parent, he's just mad because he was outbidded.
I remember aluminum wire, and the fires. The chief problem was not that the "metal tends to flow" (that is just wrong). The problem was that aluminum had a significantly different coefficient of thermal expansion. One way of dealing with it was to tighten everything regularly (prohibitively expensive) or to just attach the wires with screws that had coefficients of thermal expansion compatible with aluminum.
I remember it ended with thieves recycling manhole covers in the 1980's, and some thieves were actually caught and punished. Plus open manhole cover deaths were common, common enough that open manhole covers were put on the SF city street maps. (last housing crisis)
"I have a better idea, find a more productive way for these individuals to make money. "
Yeah, a bullet to the back of the head. Then you put their head on a pike outside their home with a message that says "keep you f*cking hands off stuff that doesn't belong to you"
The problem would disappear in about 3 days.
I'll see your stolen security fence and raise you a stolen security camera.
OK, so it was a general-use webcam, not MAINLY for security, but it did serve that function... even got 2 shots of the guy taking it. :-)
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
About ten years ago, Stanford used to have a small fenced yard on Stock Farm Road which contained some large stainless steel items, mostly large-diameter plumbing left over from physics experiments. A small radioactive trefoil was posted on the fence, and it had its own street light, but other than that, it wasn't protected.
I bicycled by this every day on my way to the Stanford barn (I kept a horse on campus at the time). One day I noticed that the fence had been cut and much of the metal was missing. So I stopped by Stanford's toxic waste incinerator ("environmental safety facility") nearby to report this, and was sent to the radiation safety officer. He immediately made some calls.
Stanford had to have people check all the scrapyards for miles around, but nothing seriously radioactive turned up. The steel had been there for years, and was down to about twice background, so it wasn't a serious hazard. It was from experiments at the old linear accelerator (not SLAC, the little one at Hansen Labs), and had picked up some induced radioactivity. You can't really make stainless all that radioactive. Stanford shipped out the remaining metal to some remote disposal site for burial.
You just tax coper recyclers for this social externality, decreasing the value further.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Honest social rebels may live illegally in a foreclosed house, torch a ski resort, etc. Fine cool, fight the power man. But dumb coper thieves need to get chewed up by the property owners dog.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
I am in ur spectrum, steelin ur Hertz...
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
As an electrical engineer, I can sorta back up the exploding ankles. Even though I never heard of of something like that happening before. The body has higher electrical resistance in joints like elbows, knees and ankles, thus more electrical effect is exerted there (electric shock victims usually have internal(!) burn wounds in the elbow joints. Even if the rest of the arm seems okay). So if the current air-gapped from the ankles to the ground, because of, say rubber soles in the shoes. The result would be exploding ankles and intact shoes.
"When encountering a gold mine, one must prepare oneself for the shaft." -BOFH
My brother rehabs repossessed homes in Kansas City (another story) and copper theft there is rampant. A deserted home is apt to be stripped of copper in the first 72 hours it is empty with the thieves demolishing walls and anything else that gets in their way. They work fast and ugly. A neighborhood can go down even quicker when homes not only stand empty but are broken into by professionals who can literally tear out most of the copper in less than an hour.
It's clear and predictable that the largest possible cranium allowable by normal birth, is given by the parameters of the birth canal and the engines of natural selection. The maximum brain volume must therefore have an upper limit, and by that reasoning the maximum number of neurons and neural branches must be finite in number for any given Homo Sapien. This automatically implies that given the most optimal process of education, nutrition, and training, their must be an upper limit to human intelligence.
Just as clearly, there seems to be no such limit to human stupidity. Any time you think you've met someone who must certainly be the most ignorant, mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging, imbecile to ever fall into our space-time continuum, you need only go around the corner to bump into somebody who by comparison makes the former seem possibly sired by Einstein himself.
If there is any justice in this world, one of these idiots will receive a potentially lethal electric shock in the process of committing his larceny, and arrive at a hospital whose life support equipment has been rendered nonfunctional because of the damage done to the neighborhoods electrical infrastructure. There's should be a special corner in the seventh level of hell for the criminally stupid!
As anyone who has ever had to deal with the police knows the only crimes they really take seriously and try and stop are speeding and murder. The police do very little about property crime.
The obvious solution is in areas where there is lots of copper theft to setup sting operations and good quality surveillance of existing sites. Follow it up with what everyone is recommending... tighter rules on scrap metal foundries and again use stings and audits to verify the rules are being followed.
But none, or little of this is going to happen. The police are far to busy aggressively addressing speeding
Here in China, I saw many times the funny signs near optical fibre facilities reading "This is optical cable with zero copper in it. It's no use stealing it."
Believe me. It's real.
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
We dealt with several outages last year and early this year due to copper thefts in Dallas where they broke fiber while stealing the copper. They've stopped. Railroads were having problems because the brake piping on some cars and traction motor cables on locomotives are copper and brass, reports suggest they've almost come to to a halt.
Which once again proves how much petty crime could be solved by giving drug addicts free drugs.
Not substitutes, not forcing them on withdrawal programs. Just give them the drugs (plus needles) until they decide to clean themselves up.
Here in Argentina, is pretty common to be "disconnected" from internet, not by your ISP, but from stolen wires.
The usual job includes "burning" the wires after, in order to extract the copper from the isolation.
The Bush regime has gone out of its way to trash other parts of the country's infrastructure?
The article mentioned Arizona as one area with a serious copper theft problem. It's getting pretty bad in Phoenix particularly.
Scrap metal dealers here are now required by law to report all scrap metal purchases in excess of $50. The thieves have responded by negotiating with the scrap metal dealers to keep their reimbursement amounts just below that critical threshold.
We've had thieves in my neighborhood take a circular saw to bundles of cables, effectively cutting off Qwest customers from their phones (and in our case, VDSL for TV and broadband). These are cable bundles protected inside of steel conduits or pipes!
It's gotten to the point that Qwest has decided it does not want to maintain its Choice TV service beyond 2010, and so Qwest is now encouraging its customers to switch their TV service to DirecTV (through a partnership deal), and I've been told that they will be transitioning their Choice broadband customers to some new high-speed network standard over the next couple years. (I've been told either 12 or 20 megabit service will be coming to my area.) In the meantime, those of us who are still stuck on Choice TV until we can figure out what to do are left with a dwindling number of viable copper pairs we can use; nobody at Qwest is putting up replacement lines or fixing/reconditioning the existing lines, so I've had Qwest downgrade my broadband service twice from 3 megabit to 1.5 megabit to compensate for now-marginal signal levels.
Although I'm sure it was mainly a business case for Qwest deciding it doesn't want to compete with cable operators after all, I am also sure that repeated vandalism of Qwest property and theft of its copper is playing a large part in this decision.
I have had several hundred of dollars in copper stolen from me in the last year, I have also lost quite a bit in high grade aluminum stock and even more in some really nice stainless steel items. I am pretty certain I know who took it and where they sold it, but given it was several weeks before I noticed it missing and the generic nature of scrap materials it was pretty hopeless to pursue. One of the persons who I suspect of taking it got a second party message that I thought he took it and wanted to talk to him one last time, I haven't see the lazy ass squirrel brained weeny since. Shame, I had been collecting the stuff for many years and most of it was not intended to be scrap but instead to be reused in projects like a really nice BBQ, solar panels, a fluidized bed wood fired boiler, etc. Pisses me off more to think of it being crushed or shredded than issues about the simple loss of $$'s. That and the fact that I had often befriended these morons and many times fed them way to much of my locally famous sassafras pork loin.
wabi-sabi
matthew