(The Associated Press circulated the following on February 10.)
DAVENPORT, Iowa — Pat Barry’s more than three decades in law enforcement has taught him that copper thieves often are cagey vultures, raiding construction sites of metal to sell for scrap and a quick score. But the boldness of the rip-offs in his turf lately has Barry aghast.
In Illinois’ Will County near Chicago, thieves have snipped miles of electrified lines from along railroad tracks, risking life and limb and, in some cases, disrupting traffic along the rails to cash in on soaring copper prices.
“We haven’t seen the real aggressiveness like this for some of these thieves” until recently, said Barry, a former law enforcer who’s now the spokesman for Will County’s sheriff’s department. “But what it also tells you is that if they’re willing to do that, they’re willing to do it anywhere.”
There’s no shortage of evidence.
Around Council Bluffs, Iowa, the theft of copper wire from freeway lights is on the upswing, with roughly 11,000 feet of wire worth more than $11,000 ripped from light poles, state transportation officials say. The thieves routinely have yanked out as much as 300 feet of the wire at a time, in many cases rendering stretches of the highway dark and dangerous.
“I think they’re more brazen,” even hitting high-visibility, well-traveled stretches, said Dena Gray-Fisher, an Iowa Department of Transportation spokeswoman. “It’s very lucrative.”
Scrap-metal thievery is not a new phenomenon, with robbers for decades stepping up their plundering of copper from vacant houses, businesses, construction sites, churches and even graveyards whenever the price of the metal goes up.
Over the past year or so, anything has been fair game — siding, gutters, spools of electric cable, pipes, even beer kegs. Some of the more brazen thieves have raided salvage yards, then sold the stolen metal back to the businesses.
Many states, on the other hand, including Illinois, are trying to crack down with measures that, among other things, would require scrap dealers to keep detailed records on those who sell them metal, creating a paper trail that could lead to arrests.
Pillaging from railroads and freeway lighting can carry a human cost.
On freeways, motorists depend on good lighting when snowfall and drifting snow can make driving treacherous, Gray-Fisher said.
Wiring stripped from railroads may expose thieves to electrocution and motorists to malfunctioning crossing gates and signals, though Union Pacific’s Mark Davis said many of those systems are backed up by batteries that would keep the gates down until crews make the fix.
A law already on the books requires any buyer of any type of copper, brass or aluminum to record the name and address of the person selling more than $100 worth of the materials to a recycling center.
Morris Tick Co., a central Illinois company that buys, among many other things, copper scrap, already takes down the information of sellers, said purchaser Pat Headrick.
“I don’t know if someone’s stealing (the copper) or not,” Headrick said. “We take information because we feel it is important and necessary.”
When thieves stole some copper wiring out of the Chicago office of state Rep. Monique Davis, D-Chicago, she discovered that repairing the damage can run into the thousands of dollars.
To combat the theft and sale of copper wiring and piping from buildings in Illinois, Davis has introduced legislation requiring a photo identification when selling copper at recycling centers. As written the proposal differs from the law on the books only in that it specifically calls for the logging of copper sales and would require records regardless of the dollar amount sold.
The legislation is House Bill 4668.
(Kenneth Lowe, Quad-City Times Springfield Bureau, contributed to this story.)