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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.........
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
http://darwinawards.com/darwin/darwin2001-16.html
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.
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.
actuality Vancover island Rogers internet lines where taken out 2 times because of this. Theafs got into a manhole and just grabbed wire. fiber line came to so Vancover island lost all internet from Rogers. 6 months later SAME exact thing happened. And yes there are redundant lines but that one spot is the OLNY place the lines are in the same place, crossing. Know the tech who got called out
I heard a story awhile back about a couple of copper thieves that got what they had coming. Seems these two where fresh off the boat from Somalia or some other 3rd world hell hole. They decided the best way to earn a living was to ply the same trade here as they did there.
So they slipped over a fence one night to steal some big ass copper bars. They where to stupid to notice the train tracks next door. The copper bars where feed lines to the subway 3rd rail. They say that when the bodies where collected the current exiting had actually blown the feet off at the ankles. The shoes that the feet where in where still in fine condition.
I can't verify if this story is true or not so I really doubt it happened but when copper theft comes up I always remember it.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
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.
In Goodyear, AZ we had someone take down a whole power pole. Took out power to about 4000 homes in my area. The guy claimed he "enjoyed [the] sparks". He had apparently previously been arrested for copper theft. Picked a fantastic day to do it too. 115 Degree high that day... The wife and I spent the day at a friends house. http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/2008/07/15/20080715swv-arrest0718.html
Logic is flawed
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.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Substation theft is very common. There are incidents of copper bus (thick copper bars) just being cut through and taken. The theives don't cut all of the buswork because that would alert someone when the power went out. The problem is that if you remove 1/4 or 1/3 of the copper, there is a good chance that the remaining copper will heat up and then fail. Copper thieves have shut off the power on more than one occassion to lots of people.
Knives and hacksaws are relativley common for substation thieves. Apparentley they think that their rubber soled shoes and rubber gloves can keep them safe against 115kV. Sometimes it does, but when it does not...it is ugly.
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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On many parts of a substation, insulation wouldn't matter.
A friend of mine is the chief engineer for an array of power plants in the area. Apparently he once found the exploded body of a guy who had opened up a 20,000V feeder and was using a screwdriver and a pair of pliers, both insulated. He was dead before the tools ever came into contact with the transformer coils.
I believe three limbs were broken off by the arc, one arm and both legs, all cauterized so that there was surprisingly little blood.
The copper thieves have been very successful though: in what he believes was an inside job, some people entered a mothballed plant through a tunnel from a nearby substation and took about $20,000 worth of copper from lines that came directly off of the generator. I believe there were tens of feet of this wire, about 1-2" in diameter, that they removed in chunks and transported out underground.
The worst case, however, was a bit more scary. At one point some copper thieves got into the same mothballed plant, found a locked door, turned on a forklift and rammed the door with the forklift until the forklift fell down some nearby stairs and got stuck. DHS then got interested in the plant since had the thief made it into this room, he would have been able to shut down power for the entire city of Pittsburgh (the plant was mothballed, but the substation controls in this room were active)! Now the plant's fitted with IR cameras and anyone who gets spotted is likely to be answering some questions courtesy of the DHS cowboys.
~Ben
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.
Funny thing is: There are actually plastics that are conductive. PVC is not one of them though. ;)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Yup, that's correct. My cousin did her thesis on conductive polymers.
The most interesting applications would be batteries, but right now, the capacity/weight ratio of polymer batteries doesn't look very good compared to metal-based couples.
Fantasy: http://ferrisfantasy.blogspot.com/
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.
I've got a house with aluminium wiring, so I've done tons of reading and research in determining if rewiring is really worth the cost.
The real problem with aluminium wiring is that when it went into place, they used the same gauge wire as the copper it replaced. Aluminium is softer, and will oxidise more readily than copper, but it is actually better suited for wiring provided that you upgrade the gauge appropriately.
Thermal expansion was a culprit only because the screw cap connectors were used in binding to copper wire, and twist around the screw terminals were commonly re-purposed for aluminium. Neither are really appropriate, the best aluminium connections are made with compression screws that secure straight wires in a metal block (clamps), not wrap-around screw posts.
Naturally the history of aluminium screw ups in housing make it nearly impossible to consider wiring a house with anything that's not copper. The fears are so great that I don't think it will ever be legal to use anything other than copper for a long, long time.