MossRoad
Super Moderator
- Joined
- Aug 31, 2001
- Messages
- 60,329
- Location
- South Bend, Indiana (near)
- Tractor
- Power Trac PT425 2001 Model Year
Yeah. We had a rash of a few years of copper thefts. They'd steal your AC condenser and get $20 for it at the scrap yard. It would cost you many hundreds to replace it. My wife had a friend that bought his first house. He'd go over there after work to work on it before moving in. One day he showed up and someone had stolen the aluminum siding from 2 sides of the house up as far as they could reach.Yes, copper was being stolen from just about everything, including peoples outside AC units.
Cops said they probably cut it into pieces, melted the plastics off in a fire, and then turned it in for scrap.
South Bend had a huge manufacturing complex around the Studebaker corridor during WWII. There were lots of large tunnels connecting many of the factories. Large enough to drive trucks through unseen from above. Lots of underground manufacturing, etc. Anyhow, all that required power. So lots of copper down there. So around the same time all these copper thefts started, these homeless guys would break into the abandoned tunnels and steal the wiring. Eventually they'd get to locked gates at in-use factories, break into those, and start stealing stuff that was live. I recall one of them getting electrocuted.
All of that prompted local authorities to require junk yards to keep daily logs of what people brought in, and they had to be photographed, and they had to present state I.D. before they could sell any scrap. Those policies remain in place today. Even just aluminum cans and you have to get photographed and I.D.'d.