[hoosierboy]

Its amazing in town here people are stealing houses, not literally off their foundations, but stealing all the aluminum siding off the house. People are also stealing manhole covers from the streets causing dangerous conditions.

[Seeking the truth]

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.

[mbynack]

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.

[dakine]

I heard of this being popular in the late 70s....

[Kieri]

There's a huge rise in home air conditioner thefts in Detroit. They're being ripped right off their concrete pads for the copper and steel.

Replacing them is very expensive due to the higher steel prices AND the increased SEER rating requirements.

[coconutt2000]

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.

[ExpatCanuck]

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.

[Gondring]

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! :-(

[P-40]

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.

[Bones75]

This reminds me so much of a book I'm currently reading: "The Corner", by David Simon and Edward Burns.. GREAT book! Lot's of vivid description of the scrap metal game in the book.

[CurlyDave]

40 years ago, copper prices went up and childhood neighbor kid tried to steal the main power lead to some sort of factory.

He lost both arms when he discovered it was energized at 440 volts. Tragic, but it cured him of stealing, at least illegally. Now he legally steals disbility from all of us.