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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Unicorn bones. Veeerrrry rare, Veeerrrrry expensive...
Hi, I Boris. Hear fix bear, yes?
"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!
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..
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
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.
..."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.
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.
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.
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*
How about they not immigrate illegally and then steal copper? Seriously, WTF.
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
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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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
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".
What "fucked up" system are you talking about?
The one where money earns money faster than labor can. The one where a minimum wage worker can be fired for being 10 minutes late one day, but the CEO that drives his company into the ground gets millions of dollars in bonuses. The one that incarcerates a greater proportion of its population than any other country in the world. If you haven't noticed how fucked up America is, you simply haven't been paying attention.
Yes, people are responsible for their own actions. But they don't act in a vacuum. Nobody would choose to steal copper from a live power station if they had other alternatives. We can either give them alternatives, or we can watch this kind of criminal behavior continue. That's our choice as a society, and we're going to have to live with the consequences. Which would be least costly?
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When legal, the drugs become a lot cheaper. Also when legal, drug use is less of a barrier to employment. It's really pretty simple.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I say use metallic sodium. Cheap, conductive, and resistant to theft.
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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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 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/
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'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. :-)
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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.