So here I sit down in South STL City, it seems someone thought it would be a good idea to scale a pole and cut down a large cable span to try and pawn the copper for crack money....  



They droped the span and find out its Fiber, not copper, they scatter like roaches and leave it lay...



3AM I get the wake up call to go drive all over the city to investigate why this customer is down...
Seems like this time they wacked a pretty good span with a lot of fiber pairs... 3rd time in as many months I've been called out for this at 3:00am



On standby waiting for Fiber crews...





As a side note, the bridge on Grand right passed 40 is being down down today....  YEA!!!! Had to find an alternate route to get to my own site...



Another side note, these theving bastages have hit also hit two of my Buds rental houses and jacked all his Copper....



Not Happy...

Copper theft has been a big problem in St Louis City and St Louis County for some time now.  Copper theft was the motive for a little over 16% of all burglaries in North St Louis County last year.  Scrapping as an occupation is popular in the County and City and has spread to a high rate of catalytic converter thefts. If you steal 10 converters a week and bring them to the scrap yard about 4 at a time  (some scrap places pay cash up to 500.00 and depending on the converter, you can get about 100.00 for each one.) you could easly clear 1,000 cash a week.

We just cleared one up in South/Central County - boyfriend/girlfriend team.

smullen, who's fiber got cut?

I know for sure 168 Pairs worth were Charters....  Thats what got me up....  



ATT and a few other local companies that have fiber could have been in it if it was a shared Bundle/Path....



Its amazing how so many different companies crap can run though the same path....  Gets worse at river crossings...

Props...  



I hope they really get the book thrown at them....  



You can't imagine how much the repairs cost and worse, what the down time costs us in SLAs....

Kinda related.. My neighbors cut my cable line and spliced it with a radio shack splitter no idea how long they were using it.  I only noticed when my phone started going out randomly.

Had a coworker who's neighbor rented out there house after they moved to another hoping to wait out the property value rise so they could sell.

The tenants were there for 30 days and ripped the entire inside of the house apart to take the copper.

It was unreal.

What's scrap copper prices up to?  Copper theft was pretty bad here in North Central Arkansas a year or two ago, but seems to have tapered off.

I work at Home Depot in Bridgeton and as soon as it warms up and folks turn on their AC they will be coming in to get new copper lines to replace the ones stolen over winter.  It happened last season.  

They'll be picking them up?  More likely the Heating and Air guys will be getting paid from the insurance co's.  
It all stinks...

Good to know there is a fellow ARFcom'er so close....



 

Hopefully they aren't, there is a lot more involved than just putting 2 pieces of copper back in, not to mention its illegal, there are ways to prevent this from happening, but the initial investment is sizeable, and usually people don't want to pay it.




Don't blame us man, we didn't steal the stuff.


I'm just waiting to hear a story about some thief cutting into the lineset on a system using 410a while running on a hot day, that's not gonna turn out well for them

Ok so how do we identify you next time we're shopping there?  

I poured some slab houses at 14th and cass and they had to paint the copper black to look like pvc to get them to stop stealing it. also its like $3.25 a pound

They've wised up to the paint thing now.. Jus Sayin

This.  An experienced S-bag or team has figured it out.

Over half of ours and the immediate area's thefts would have been stopped if neighbors had called.

"Ma'am, did you notice anything suspicious?"  

"Well, not so much suspicious, but there was a red van parked in front of my neighbor's house.  They moved out a few weeks ago, so the two people with the bold cutters, saws and other tools I saw entering through the basement window didn't really raise my suspicion".