Good. Dead criminals don't re-offend. I am pleased no one from the rescue services or the public was hurt.
In the UK an acquaintance from a DNO in the Midlands claims their company loses the earth mat from a distribution substation every week and from a grid substation each month. Scary.
Finding the 300 mcm copper earthing conductor missing on 2 grounding transformers (zig zag)leaving more than a dozen transmission lines without ground fault protection.
Should we cry over the bodies of dead copper thieves?
Not me.
I think the most baffling thing is the thieves' lack of respect for electricity. Copper thieves are heard in the news getting burned or killed all the time. Maybe they think that they're smarter than the guys in the news?
There was a guy found walking up the road a few years ago that never was arrested for breaking into the substation at a steel mill. Why? His hair and all of his clothes were burned off. The police figure he learned his lesson. You have to be some kind of stupid to try and steal a live electrical line.
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If it is broken, fix it. If it isn't broken, I'll soon fix that.
My company was sued and forced to pay death benefits and damages to survivors of a thief that stole 4 bays of 1000 kcmil copper overhead strain bus from a partially abandoned WWII vintage substation. The 5th bay was energized. Based on the number and depth of the tire ruts across the field, he made 4 trips with a heavily loaded vehicle (small tracks coming in, deep ruts driving out.) He was found laying on the overhead support steel with bolt cutters on the energized cable.
We lost the case because the faded sign on the fence only said "Danger High Voltage". According to the family's lawyers it was also supposed to say "KEEP OUT". The no trespassing signs on the fences at the road, the two barbed wire fences in the field, the high substation fence and the locked gates were not considered by the court. He had cut through all of them.
Yes I have seen the ripped up ground grid and the nuetral lead cut off a hot 35 KV voltage regulator. Apparently the lead fell back against the case causing quite a large arc blast from forensic evidence. The pattern of cut ground wires in the substation stopped at this point (HA HA).
Police checked local hospitals to find recent burn victims with upper face and body burns. Fake video cameras were put up to help stop the theft, so far this has worked.
Technodog
Even my horse learned not to touch an electric fence after 2 attempts...
A contractor friend has calculated that his losses THIS YEAR ALONE exceed $100,000 from copper theft. He built a set of power and control trailers for rock crusher operations., Theives cut the locks and removed the bus bars from MCCs and switchgear, then cut all of the portable cords used to connect mobile equipment.
In my opinion the removal or ground equipment or other safety related systems involving electricity should be considered attempted 2nd degree murder! Or at the very least, willful disregard for public safety, maybe even industrial terrorism. Then the scrap yards who buy this stuff from questionable sources could be held liable for aiding and abetting.
As far as I am concerned, payment from scrap yards should be required to be put into escrow with the state and held for 30 days (or more). The state would then mail a check to the address given by the person turning in the metal. An inventory would have to be kept by the scrap yard and reports of stolen metal would compared against those inventories.
Now THAT's a good idea! Essentially like a blind trust, but if you are a perp, not so blind as to prevent sending in the gendarmes if there is suspicion as to the source of the metals! I may write my legislators about that one davidbeach.
I figure that no one would steal metal for a drug hit next month. The 30 day requirement would in and of it self eliminate most of the problem. To make it worth the 30 day wait someone would probably need to turn in a fair amount and that would make stolen property easier to determine.
One electrical utility I used to work for used aluminum structures for its long distance transmission line structures. Local "entrepreneurs" would ride up the rights of way, unbolting the lower lattice cross-members and sell them for scrap.
One clear summer day they had a line trip out, and dispatched a line crew to look for the source of the fault. They found it. One of the entrepreneurs had gotten ambitious in his collection efforts and removed several cross-members, the last one being one too many. They found him in the mass of collapsed aluminum, pickup truck nearby.
At one of our customer's cell sites,thieves stole all the copper grounding cables for each guy wire.The tower later got hit by lightning and all the electronics got fried.
