boogeyman
Gold Member
- Jun 6, 2006
- 5,016
- 4,399
- Detector(s) used
- WHITES, MINELAB, Garrett
- Primary Interest:
- All Treasure Hunting
Out here they were sawing off the cats from fleet trucks & letting the air out of the outside tire on the duals & sliding the tires off. We even had guys going up the sticks trying to steal the pole pigs! Up in Phoenix a guy staggered into a Circle K & asked them to call para medics his friend was hurt. This guy was burned all up his right side. They had kicked open two chain link fence gates & cut the lock open on a third, then pried open a transformer cabinet. His friend had shorted a live wire direct to ground! He ended up losing both hands & an eye. Some other guys had pulled out all the sprinkler & light wiring from the conduit in the ground. The tweekers were actually going behind apartments, dismantling the AC units & walking off with the coils & motors! Some were cutting the fences of the substations & rolling spools of wire into pickups. Sad thing about it is, even if the wire is recovered it's useless to the power company because the thieves chop it up. In Cali they were swiping the guard rails from the freeways & one guy had like 20 or 30 manhole covers in the bottom of his truck with water heaters stacked on top. Another guy chopped up a bunch of shiny new rebar & filled a water heater with it. Copper pipeI hear Ya. Heck they were even stealing the Sewer Lids, Funny Somebody was buying them & the hundreds of bronze Vases from Grave Sites. + all the Catalytic Converters that were saw-sawed of fleet trucks over the weekend or Holidays .
There are some honest scrap yards but many 'Owners' are crooked & likely involved in organized crime.
A couple years ago I wondered why some 10 miles of Pole mounted on the Median wall on I 75 4-7 lanes each direction were not on, I asked a friend who is city power guy what was the deal ?
He said all the Wiring was stolen , This would take a bucket truck , block the fast lane on an interstate patrolled by 4 different State agency's.
Then there was a whole Tractor trailer or 2 filled with brand new wire from 'Southern Wire' that likely ended up in China.
Hundreds of similar cases just in the Atlanta metro.
For about a year or so if you had copper pipe on the outside of a building, it was gone in a heartbeat!Now I've gotta ask, with every example above, how could you say the scrap yard operators didn't know the stuff was hot!?!?!?
