Copper Thieves Jeopardize US Infrastructure 578
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.)
Special license... (Score:5, Interesting)
If you had to be an official 'something' or licensed...that would stop a lot of criminals I'd think?
Plumbing out of house stolen (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Special license... (Score:4, Interesting)
Old News. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Tragic... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
aluminum (Score:5, Interesting)
Been going on a long time. (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:Some Darwin awars ready and waiting (Score:2, Interesting)
just went through it (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
No copper at my place (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Special license... (Score:4, Interesting)
...and while you're at it, let's just expand the idea to suggest you must bear the mark of the beast before you should be allowed to buy or sell anything.
Re:Special license... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Don't Pay Cash (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Re:Plumbing out of house stolen (Score:5, Interesting)
Had some friends in a landscaping, odd jobs business where they were knocking down an old building and trying to save what was worth scraping for the owner to offset costs of a new building somewhat.
So they had some scrapers come by while they were knocking down a section of the building, who started picking up stuff from their scrap pile and throwing it on their truck. When they were asked what they thought they were doing (getting caught), they unloaded the stuff and had a laugh about it saying they'd just be back later.
So the guys knocking the place down parked their back-hoe across the only real entrance to the place and parked other machinery on top of the scrap piles. When they came in the next day, the windows were broken out of their equipment and someone had shit in the cabs of the equipment.
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.
Re:High Voltage (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Special license... (Score:2, Interesting)
What they NEED to do is require not only an ID from people selling the metal, but NOT TO PAY THEM ON THE SPOT. They can get their check in 30 days MAILED to their house. If these tweakers need to give out an address then they will be less likely to go to the recyclers. Of course, this doesn't 100% negate the above point I first made, but makes it significantly more difficult for metal thieves. It also allows Joe consumer an avenue to sell of scrap lying in their yard without any extra burden.
Additionally, the recyclers should require some type of receipt for all the metal they take so that there is at least a semblance of a paper trail.
Re:Special license... (Score:3, Interesting)
Weird, quotes are only messed up in the preview and reply screens.
Re:aluminum (Score:2, Interesting)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/2673629.stm [bbc.co.uk]
Copper in homes. (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:City lights (Score:2, Interesting)
Pakistan (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Some Darwin awars ready and waiting (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Special license... (Score:5, Interesting)
If I go to a recycler here in Fresno with much more than half a bag they are going to ask me where I work or where I got the wire. They even call employers to ensure the employees have permission to sell the wire. They generally have quit taking wire from people with shopping carts...
We have lost in this area just "Fresno" around 14 miles of wire in a very short period of time. And to quantify this even further that is ONLY the wire ran by the state. This does not include city or county lighting losses. We've had the same intersections robbed 4-5 times. Yes we have police watching them but they can only do so much.
Now something else to consider. These idiots who are stealing this wire are taking it from energized signals. We have battery backups and LED lights in our signals however that means nothing when you can't get a signal from the backup to the light pole because the wire is gone. Now we have an extremely dangerous situation. A Dark Signal. No flashing red no lights. No streetlights depending on how much wire is gone. All we need is a fatality to hang some dumbass bum with a murder charge. Not only that the governing entity will probably get a lawsuit for not having a lit intersection. It's a BAD BAD THING(tm)
So to resolve this problem we now buy Aluminum wire. As anyone who has worked with aluminum wire can attest this is not really a good solution electrically. However Fiscally it does work as the thieves are at least less likely to continue cutting an intersection apart once they realize it's not copper.
Several have already received their Darwin Award.. (Score:3, Interesting)
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 [electricalknowledge.com]
Re:Some Darwin awars ready and waiting (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Alternate Solution (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Special license... (Score:3, Interesting)
first copper is the easiest metal to melt.
Second there is normally no evidence. I knew a job where the electricans literally spent 9 hours installing 2000 pounds of copper wiring in pipe. Lock the job site and go home. by 6am the next morning the wire was gone, and the pipe had been cut into 24-48 foot pieces with the wires in them. the pipe was laying on the ground.
with sawzall and gloves they undid those work hours in less than an hour. A security camera across the street recorded an unidentifiable truck pull in, and leave an hour later. however unlike tv crime shows real security camera's have crappy resolution.
Re:We need a law (Score:4, Interesting)
Funny thing is: There are actually plastics that are conductive. PVC is not one of them though. ;)
Re:We need a law (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Stealing radioactive stainless steel (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Alternate Solution (Score:3, Interesting)
Aluminium is also almost universally accepted by recyclers, including/especially soda cans. Still, the production of Aluminium scales a bit better than copper - it's the most abundant metal in the earth, and the third most common element.
If we did something to make electricity even cheaper, it'd be even cheaper to produce and take over more tasks from copper.
Re:Aluminum wire. (Score:3, Interesting)
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.