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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.
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.
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.
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.