Stopping metal thieves!

[Engineer]

WTF people are steeling iron now?

edit: According to the report, thieves are now steeling scrap metal AND iron!

I've seen reports over the last few years of stolen man hole covers. Yes, people steal anything. Sometimes, I wonder why as it's easier to work than what they put into stealing. *shakes head*.

 

[Cogman]

My dad owns a telephone company, he used to have an exchange that went through an indian reservation. He couldn't get rid of that exchange fast enough. People would go through and steal the copper out of the telephone line. In fact, more than once a couple of them died because they tried to steal the wire out of power lines.

And of course, my dad was blamed for service outages. WTH was he supposed to do? put armed guards up at every telephone post?


Of course, wire thievery has mostly stopped because of two changes to the business. The first, all lines are buried. People would rather climb 10ft up than dig 2ft down.. Go figure. The second is the use of fiberoptic cable.. Can't strip that out with a knife .

 

[DayLaPaul]

They aren't going to self regulate themselves. Pawn shops didn't start asking for ID until they were forced to. Same thing applies here.

 

[LTC8K6]

One city in Cali was missing the wiring from over 300 power poles, iirc.

 

[Rubycon]

One city in Cali was missing the wiring from over 300 power poles, iirc.

Stupid thieving rats. They should send in some folks to help them strip the insulation from the wire - and then when they smile in return for the favor beat the living crap out of them with said sheathing! :biggrin:

 

[Newbian]

Right, because the alcohol, tobacco and firearms industry are all but failing under the weight of checking ID's and keeping records.....

It has nothing to do about that when it's involving restricted items / weapons and even then many places get away with it but the fact that people can come in the places with a truckload of scrap metal and you examine every piece and see how long you stay in business with that type of job when other places doing the same thing don't do it and it's allowed.

Plus most places as was pointed out will have melted / recycled it down before the reports come out so unless you want to prevent recycling of metal in such places simply showing a id won't do anything unless the stolen item was caught on a camera when you came into the place.

 

[LTC8K6]

Stupid thieving rats. They should send in some folks to help them strip the insulation from the wire - and then when they smile in return for the favor beat the living crap out of them with said sheathing! :biggrin:

The thieves were actually knocking the poles over with something first...so they lost the poles and the wiring...

 

[Sho'Nuff]

I don't get this:
Why don't the scrap yards make it mandatory for those "cashing in" to produce positive identification, take a thumb print, etc.?

1. Its expensive; and 2) one the metal product is molten down, it is nearly impossible to trave where it came from.

FWIW, my father in law used to work for the phone company in Maine. He said that it was not uncommon for folks in northern Maine to try to steal and scrap miles of telephone and electrical cable. Sometimes they would steal rolls of the stuff off the back of the phone company's trucks. Fortunately for the phone company, that stuff was easy to trace and the local scrapyards all knew where it came from. Its one thing to trade in a few yards of copper pipe or some signage. It is another thing to steal 20,000 worth of cabling and try to fence it at the local dump.

 

[spacejamz]

fvckin azzholes...

they stole the water pipes from this person's home which flooded his property with 200,000 gallons of water...all of this damage for probably $30-$50 worth of copper

http://www.wfaa.com/news/crime/Man-Made-Flood-Threatens-Historic-Home-130737883.html

they steal the copper from a/c units in churches, schools, centers to assist the public...