Posted on 01/24/2005 1:13:36 PM PST by hsmomx3
PHOENIX (AP) -- They look like cobwebs or huge balls of spaghetti hanging from electric poles across Mexico, gigantic clusters of illegal electric lines known as diablitos, or "little devils."
Dentist Benjamin Rodriguez has one hanging outside his window in the Xochimilco neighborhood of Mexico City. Like an evil parasite, it makes his lights flicker and stops his dental drill. Occasionally, the transformer across the street explodes.
"Six or seven times a year, the power just goes out completely," Rodriguez said.
"You call the power company and they come and cut all the illegal lines and the next day they're back up."
Mexico's Energy Department says electricity thieves are bleeding the country's power grid dry, causing millions of dollars of losses, starting fires and crippling the country's efforts to modernize.
Now the government has launched a crackdown on the thieves, installing tamper-proof meters and running ads urging people to report theft.
"To the devil with diablitos!" say TV commercials as cartoon devils with electrical cords for tails prowl the streets of a darkened neighborhood.
In central Mexico alone, the amount of electricity lost, mainly through diablitos, rose 8.7 percent from September 2003 to September 2004, according to Luis de Pablo, director of Central Light and Power. In the rest of the country, it rose 1.3 percent.
In Mexico state, where squatters have built entire cities around the capital, about 300,000 houses are using stolen power, according to the state Electrification Board.
That's equivalent to a city the size of Tucson, and the figure doesn't count the thousands of diablitos serving taco stands, CD sellers and other street vendors.
"It really hurts us, because that money could be going into infrastructure," said Gerardo Lerma, a spokesman for Central Light and Power.
Diablitos were cited as the possible cause of a fire that swept through a shantytown in Juarez in 2003, killing four women, and one that destroyed a public market in Durango in May. On Dec. 2, two firefighters were injured battling a blaze caused by a diablito at a recycling warehouse in the Mexico City suburb of San Juan Tlihuaca.
The government launched its campaign against diablitos in 2003, but honest electricity customers say it has not gone far enough. On Oct. 14, customers from Mexico state protested in front of Central Light and Power, demanding that the company take action against theft, which is inflating their electricity bills.
The illegal lines are an epidemic in low-income places like Xochimilco. Around the central plaza, street vendors have broken open ornamental lampposts and strung lines to their stands. Other lines disappear into homes.
Thieves around the plaza refused to give their names. But many said they have to use the diablitos because the government is slow to install new lines to homes and has only a few electrical outlets for street vendors.
In the past two years, Central Light and Power has installed 500,000 tamper-proof meters and 840 miles of new cable with an outer coating meant to foil electricity thieves, Lerma said.
It has also gotten 250,000 thieves to become paying customers by installing new lines to their homes, he said. Electricity theft is a federal crime but most offenders get off with a warning because overworked prosecutors can't handle the extra cases, officials say.
There is one electric meter on the pole outside the La Vega shoe store. It's connected to outlets used by four sidewalk stands, including that of video-game seller Juan Loiza.
"We use the meter and share the bill, but look at this," he said, pointing at 10 other electric lines that climb the pole like vines. "Who else is going to pay when they can just put up a line?"
We all know that these people use underground tunnels that they build to smuggle people and drugs into our country. I can just see them splicing thru an underground cable.
It's just a high frequency step up transformer. The spark gap, capacitor and primary form a resonant circuit. The large secondary provides the step up. It is common to excite the resonant primary with something like a neon transformer.
Actually they are similar to the high voltage circuit (flyback transformer) in a TV. The big difference is a true tesla coil uses a spark gap where your TV does not.
That's when you were young and dumb, huh? Had you said what a wonderful country is she probably would have married you on Sunday morning.
Shouldn't we be looking more into these things so we can be less dependent on oil? Just wondering aloud. Don't mind me *LOL*
BTW, very nice coil you described. :-)
What is that supposed to mean?
People have been building these for years. Unfortunately you cannot get something from nothing. (At least at this level of physics :-))
Takes more power to run than you can "reap". :-)
What is happening is that the peons are paying for their stolen electricty but not paying the electric company. It is electric company and government employees who are setting up the power taps and charging the users for doing so. They rationalize that the power comes from the public entity and they can take it and sell it.
Just check your local Mexican landscapping crews. They all think it is perfectly acceptable in the US to blow leaves out into the street because the street is a public asset.
Here, the real thieves are electric company employees and no one is going to stop them because they are related to company officials and government folks and kick back to them a portion of the peons' pesos.
I should probably read up before asking too many questions (at risk of sounding completely ignorant), but I am curious about what causes the effect.
Do the Tesla coils use a single, constant source of alternating current?
I ought to be going back to that site soon. Wanna tag along?
They are so used to people giving them fish instead of showing them how to fish.
You need to contact JimRob and volunteer for the ZOT team!
This is why many Freepers idea of an electric fence is doomed. There would be extension cords running all the way to Mexico City.
Leave 'em alone...they're only stealing the electricity that Americans won't.
The power company should send an announcement to all paying customers that on a specified day and time they are to disconnnect from the grid for 5 minutes. When the time comes, the power company should up the voltage going through their lines by 50%. That will fry every appliance still attached to the grid. If the power thieves have no more appliances, they won't need to steal the juice.
They need more windmills.
References concerning building Tesla coils
http://205.243.100.155/frames/build1.html
Yep, Insulting the girl's country isn't exactly out of the pages of Andrew Carnegie.
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