Posted on 08/17/2006 7:00:32 AM PDT by hoosierboy
Scrap theft is pushing the stats higher, as more and more vacant houses are stripped of metals like copper.
A pound of copper a year ago went for about $1.75, now scrap dealers are paying upwards of $3.00 per pound.
It’s enough to make police rethink their tactics.
Division Chief Darryl Boykins of the South Bend Police Department says, "There’s been a spike in the price of metal and so that's caused a whole new different type of crime now that we have to look at, that, we didn't have to look at that 10 years ago, or even five years ago."
That’s why South Bend police were talking more crime prevention and neighborhood watch programs at Wednesday’s Board of Public Safety meeting.
Boykins says, “The residential burglaries had jumped up from last year to 276, so the numbers are higher, and there's a lot of other factors you have play into that because a lot of these homes are vacant homes. It's not just South Bend where thieves are targeting metal and copper, a little research on line shows that this is a growing problem all over the country. In fact, in Texas, police caught thieves after they cut down a transformer. They were trying to get to the copper inside."
Back here in South Bend, the theft of city manhole covers prompted the city council in April to pass a new scrap metal ordinance.
Scrap yards to report all purchases within 24 hours.
Also required is the seller’s name, finger print, license numbers and an address of where the metal was obtained.
However, some people question whether the plan is truly working, with this crime still on the rise.
Some wonder how police will be able to track copper wiring to a particular theft -- like the one that occurred in the basement of this vacant home on Marion Street.
Until police come up with another strategy, they ask you to be vigilant.
Boykins states, "If you see a car or truck parked in the back of the house for 3 or 4 hours ripping off siding, someone should probably call the police."
Here in Las Vegas, just this past weekend, a landlord got a bunch of complaints on a Monday morning from his large commercial buiding.
We have no Air Conditioning! This is Las Vegas, after all...the desert.
He called the AC company and discovered all the copper tubing on the roof was gone as in stolen.
We had a lightening strike on our home a few years ago and it wiped out just about every electrical appliance in the house. The electrician checked the grounding rod and found that someone had cut it off and stolen most of it. They checked the other homes in the area and all of them were gone. The rods are about an inch in diameter and six feet long. They had cut about six inches off the top of them and put it back in the ground and took the rest.
I worked in a third-world country where it was nearly impossible to upgrade the urban infrastructure, because the copper that was laid during the day was dug-up and stolen at night.
Happened to a local church here, and many other buildings. Too many people are just garbage, sad to say.
What are we coming to? I shouldn't ask because I'm afraid I know the answer.
Hope your landlord was able to get it back up and running.
I heard of this being popular in the late 70s....
I'm going out at night stealing asphalt.
Replacing them is very expensive due to the higher steel prices AND the increased SEER rating requirements.
!
There are junk yards full of scrap metal out there that have yet to be tapped.
If anything ever happens to our civilization, any successor civilizations will not have to figure out what metal is... they'll have to try and figure out where it comes from, besides coming pre-smelted from one of our scrap heaps, or dumps.
I just got a revised estimate from my contractor on a house I am rehabbing - an extra $3800 to replace copper pipes stolen over the weekend.
Often, the theft of a few dollars of materials (from, for example, a pad-mounted transformer) can cause environmental releases that cost tens of thousands of dollars to clean up! :-(
A lot of new constructs have switched over to PVC from copper. It's noisy and eventually does break down but it's a heck of a lot cheaper.
When we built two years ago, we used copper. We're just grateful we bought before prices shot through the then-unshingled roof!
These occurrences described in this recent article may indicate that people are garbage. Or it may indicate that economic pressures are at this time bearing down on some who, at the margin, are the first to abandon scruples they would otherwise maintain. Could it be that these who steal copper grounding rods and aluminum siding are those who might have worked in a factory that closed down only to reopen in Mexico or China? I don't know what their story is.
It is not just copper that is expensive. Now it is nickel. Nickel soars Everything is expensive, health care, energy, housing, everything.
Every time you measure the value of something, you must measure the value of it relative to something else. When you measure the value of copper relative to the U.S. Dollar, you imagine for practical reasons the value of the U.S. Dollar over time to be fixed, or constant. This produces the illusion of copper "going up." But if you measure the value of the U.S. Dollar relative to copper, and imagine copper to be fixed in value over time, the illusion that the dollar is going down is produced.
The illusion is in that when the values of two things go up or go down together, they will both appear to be parallel and constant. Or if one goes up while the other goes down, their divergence will be exaggerated.
The fact is, nothing is ever fixed in value, but some things can be more fixed, and less volatile than other things. Gold has a reputation for being the numeraire par excellence, because of its, to coin a term, inertia of value. By inertia, I mean it would be much much more difficult than other commodities or fiduciary instruments to get its value to rise and fall abruptly.
The U.S. Dollar has very little inertia because it is not "primary money," which only gold and silver coin can be. The U.S. Dollar is low-order, low-class money, a fiduciary instrument, fiat money, and debt based. The total volume of fiat money can increase rapidly and the purchasing power of it be diminished as fast.
To reduce the illusory effects produced by comparing small numbers of commodities, increase the number so that they average out. Create a basket of commodities and compare that to your fiat money. I submit that all things appearing to be more expensive, your "basket," should be your standard, your "zero line" on the graph, and the value of your U.S. Dollar be compared to that. In this case you will see the value of your fiat money go down exponentially. And that won't be illusory. Compare it to gold, and gold is not going down. Gold preserves value. The U.S. dollar loses value prodigously.
Iron (manhole covers, railings) = purchasing power.
Aluminum (siding, cans) = purchasing power.
Copper (wire, grounding rods, pipes) = purchasing power.
These people who are stealing metal scrap are actually, stealing purchasing power, and monetizing it, extralegally. They may be doing it out of desperation, as the Argentines did. Or they may be doing it out of greed.
But either way, they are doing it because the purchasing power of the U.S. Dollar is, because of abuse and mismanagement, being depreciated so rapidly that metals are being spontaneously monetized. A grounding rod, copper pipes, copper wire, is like a whole bunch of pennies, back when the pennies were still copper. Pennies used to be iron as well. There is a reason for that. Iron has value. Less value per pound than gold or silver, but it has value. The same applies to all these metals.
That this scrap scavenging is happening here, is a sign of a sick economy, and inflationary times. You can denounce the scavengers, the thieves, but don't fail to make the connection between their bad behavior, and the degrading condition of our economy.
Answer: inflation.
Nah, I associated it with the opportunity...it was easy to do...
Last weekend we were to set out items at the curb so they could be picked up for reuse. Anything with metal in it was taken right away by people in trucks going about the neighborhood. I talked to one of the groups doing it and they said they were grabbing things just for the metal. I loaded them up with the scrap metal collection I have been meaning to get rid of for several years.
I assume you're referring to the old PCB coolant transformers which have been largely replaced with ones using ordinary mineral oil; of course by going back to the mineral oil we now experience some rather impressive explosions and fires when a transformer is ruptured by heat through short-circuit or lightning strike.
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