Posted on 02/12/2013 7:27:10 PM PST by dennisw
Greece has been hit by an unprecedented wave of metal thefts as its recession-hit people turn to crime.
Train lines, bridges, cables and even cemeteries have all been targeted for scrap to feed a market driven by China and India.
Police now arrest an average of four metal thieves every day, compared to a few cases every month before the crisis started in late 2009. The profile of the metal thief is also changing, authorities say, from gypsies and immigrants living on the margins of society to mainstream Greeks who have fallen on hard times.
Roadside crash barriers, storm-drain covers, heavy factory doors, as well as mining equipment, irrigation machinery and even cemetery planters made of metal have all gone missing in and around Thessaloniki, the country's second largest city, amid concerns that previously law-abiding Greeks are turning to crime in growing numbers.
In northern Greece, rogue merchants have an additional advantage: An 800-mile border with four countries that makes it easier for them to dodge stepped-up police checks on local scrap yards.
Police near the frontier with Turkey last month arrested 18- and 19-year-old suspects accused for stripping nearly 1,000 feet of cable from street lights, blacking out a stretch of newly built road that runs across northern Greece.
Recent inspections also turned up more stolen cable on a passenger bus headed to Albania, along with a cache of candle holders, snatched from graveyards and loaded onto small trucks, that were stopped and searched at the Greek-Bulgarian border.
(Excerpt) Read more at express.co.uk ...
Society eventually reflects its leaders. If the leaders were criminal, the people eventually become what their leaders are and were.
That cant happen here because, well, we’re special. /sarc
This has been going on in the US for four years; the Greeks are slow on the uptake.
You can’t turn in any scrap metal without leaving a finger print, driver license copy.
I read in the paper last week that several intersections in Vallejo had no signals working because the wires were stolen out of the conduits.
I live in a new sub-division just completed construction. Our house was one of the first on the block, and we witnessed trucks coming by after all the workers had gone home and taking materials from partially finished homes.
I have seen foreclosed houses stripped of everything removable by their broke owners before moving out.
We are on a speeding train going 100 mph through the dark tunnel and at the other end is Greece. Buy guns. Might save your stuff and even your life.
>> “And that though Wisconsin is a generally honest state. Boring honest sober population compared to many other parts of America” <<
.
You’ve never been to Madison?
“Copper thieves are rampant throughout Texas”
In the LA area, copper thieves stole some grounding cables from an electric power sub-station (successfully; they did not die). The utility required replacement of those ground cables for safety. So the sub-station was shut down; traffic signals stopped; traffic accidents occurred; all due to the salvage/recycle (low) value of some copper cable.
Citizens’ lives were put at risk from these %%##@@%% copper thieves.
Other “copper harvesters” have been fried while “finding” copper.
Come to NC and see this. You don’t need to go way over to Greece. They’ve been stealing whole Central Air units, copper gutters and man hole covers here, for years.
Not the future. It's already happening in a big way. Someone correct me if I'm wrong but isn't scrap metal our leading export to China? Much of this coming from good, usable machines that have no value here but as scrap because there is nothing to use them for.
I call it infrastructure cannibalism
Read VDH, it’s our present...
This is the perfect example of the the decline of a civilization. The poor start looting the abandoned sites of the former country. Next comes the makers trying to defend their property from the barbarians. Then comes local warlords who can protect what’s left. This has been repeated over thousands of years.
It sounds like locusts are eating up the countryside!
The A/C units just kill me. They steal $20 of copper and do $10,000 of damage. I’ve actually suggested taping a $20 in a plastic envelope to A/C units.
Civilizations advance then revert to barbarism. Instead of raw materials being used by craftsmen to make valuable products like buildings and railroads, we now see scavengers reducing sophisticated products back into raw materials by having copper drain pipes or grandma’s gold jewelry melted down.
It’s the same process that occurred in Rome in the wake of their empire. The Colosseum and Forum were dismantled by the locals to make crude stone shelters to live in.
You got it backwards....
You got it backwards....
This has been happening in Detroit for years.
Save your money. They will take the $20 and still rip out the copper.
Around here, any scrap metal you put out for trash pickup will be gone within hours, long before the trash trucks come by.
Copper is not “low value” in the scrap world. why do you think they are taking it? it’s worth more than most metals.
For some copper wire I am paying over 1 dollar a foot for.
I get a buck or so a pound for my scrap copper. And yes, I need ID and have to explain why I am cashing in my box of scrap wire every few weeks.
(I am a low voltage electrician)
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.