WTF, people stealing copper cables.

[nugget378]

Originally Posted by Mechan1k

Mate of mine is a plumber ... and he has to be careful where he leaves his work vehicle ... and if it standing for a while ... to actually take the copper piping off ... as he has had some go missing from time to time on some jobs.

We had this happen a few weeks ago from work,they even ripped out the ring main we had hung up on unistrut,they needed a ladder.
The builder payed for all the stuff we had up,but what ever was on the ground we lost,it becomes a pain unloading and relaoding copper on the ute every morning and arvo,but what else can we do.
I charge everything up now with the temp supply,so at least they'll get soaked trying to cut it out...

[[Tonko]]

hmm, theres a big roll of copper pipe taped to a power pole near my place, might have to clean out the boot....

[MITCHAY]

Originally Posted by XR6 Martin

Most of the scrap copper ends up in China too. Why? Because being non ferous, there is no way to seperate it from other non ferous metals and so it has to be all sorted by hand.

That would be a bastard of a job!

[private9]

Mate, people will steal anything!

Customer of mine went to work one morning only to find the power was out. Ends up that thieves had broken in overnight and dug up all of the power lines going from the main road, 300m down to the warehouse.

My dad's business was broken into recently and they stole the batteries out of around 10 trucks, nothing else though!

[Pinkbits]

Back in the early 90's there was a spate of thefts of copper from the railway line between Dandenong and Pakenham. I remember being on night shift at Pakenham working the signal panel, picked up the phone to speak to the signalman at Dandenong and it was dead.
As soon as it was replaced, it was stolen again. Ended up having plain clothes police staking out the sides of the railway line. The thieves were eventually caught.

[ltd]

All thieves should be shot. There is no excuse for being a thief, the audacity of some of these scumbags is just shocking.
My father has a business which works predominantly with steel, and stainless steel.
One day some shacka bastards backed up to the loading dock and removed the barriers with signage saying "no trespassing", then proceeded to walk through the factory to the stainless steel area and started grabbing virgin material. By the time that the foreman had caught up with them, they already had 3 coils weighing about 100kgs each of stainless steel wire in the boot. He called out to them and they ran to their car. Next thing you know they tried to make a getaway in their magna and one of our guys blocked them in with the forklift. They were revving their car like they were going to take the forklift on so Chen (huy on the forklift) just lifted the front of their car off the ground. You should have heard the obscenities - it was feral. All the staff turned up at this stage and they stopped trying to escape. Luckily, the police took only about 10 minutes to arrive; then these lowlifes tried saying that they were given permission by the foreman to take the wire. We asked them which one was the foreman and they pretty much pointed at everyone taking a guess.
They were charged with trespass, theft, assault and a couple of other things and the best that the law could do was give them a fine of $450.00, and no conviction recorded. Stainless is getting around $3.50/kilo. How brazen is that.

Another story I heard of though was a di(khead who got into the bloodbank carpark and tried to steal wire from their main switchboard. Lets just say that the switchboard blew when this genius decided to use his body to short out 415V and about 6000amps. They had to use a genset for about a week whilst police investigated and then another 2 weeks whilst they had a new one fitted. My fathers company built the cage surrounding the new one.

[GK]

Greed is a disgraceful thing!

GK

[Psycho Chicken]

Pump the amperage up on the wires, should sort them out.

[WizBang]

I work for Telstra and on any given weekend we will losse 4-8 drums at a time .Now these 3 ton cable drums @ $2000 and ton .

[XR6-VCT-2000]

Yeah it's nothing new , people have been stealing copper cable etc for years.

Even 10 years back at a sheetmetal factory where i worked, we had around 150 spotwelders that used replacable copper tips, the boxes of old collected tips were allways going missing to some theif ! .

There was also rolls of copper cable going missing from train line depos years ago too, and all the people eventually got busted ! .

[Mechan1k]

Speaking of copper .... I had to laugh thinking about this thread ... as I followed 2 Railcorp trucks yesterday ... both of them has 2 massive reels full on the back of them ... would have been a decent weight as well .... they were driving pretty slow too.

I was just thinking how much money was on the back of them.

Told the wide about it ... and she said there had been a spate of thefts on some of the constructions sites around Leightons Contractors here and there ... it was starting to become a problem they have had to hire more security for their sites.

[ebxr8240]

Wide ??? Don't let her read this ... Lol....

[Mechan1k]

Originally Posted by ebxr8240

Wide ??? Don't let her read this ... Lol....

ummm ... oops ... bloody Monday morning typos ... I should stopping typing so quickly.

I should have used SWMBO instead.

[OXR60W]

A group was busted at Rosehill a couple of months back.
Our site had no power at the start of my shift ( 1st shift for the week,sunday night ). Called the sparkys etc,who called integral, etc etc.

Turns out they cleared the copper wires out from the empty site next door. Some security guy got the plate, they were watched and eventually busted. Its quite funny, a few weeks ago i dropped the kids at school and a friend of the wifes was telling me that his brother was arrested for stealing copper wires from building sites.

It inconvenienced me for a week or so, so im glad they got them.

The Rosehill area is a target lately. The latest trend is to cut huge arches in the roller doors and reverse utes ( or whatever ) into the building, load up and drive out. This happened to a computer w/h a few weeks ago.