The thieves strike in the middle of the night and work fast, in pairs or teams. They can make an entire neighborhood go dark in minutes. They screw open the street light maintenance boxes, find the copper wires and cut. Zip, zip.
While police nab copper thieves in the act, they can’t be everywhere. Come nighttime, some streets are as black as caves. Even if thieves stopped today, utility crews would need up to a year to fix all the damage. Meanwhile, darkened neighborhoods entice crooks bent on robbing houses, stealing cars or worse.
Lately, thieves have taken and created bigger risks, stealing copper from the lights, signs and metering signals on freeways that rim the city. Caltrans, the state agency in charge of the roads, has had to divert workers from fixing potholes, guardrails and fencing to repair damaged lights before some horrible accident happens. They too, cannot keep up with the copper thieves, who are striking several times a week.
As if Fresno, one of the poorest cities in the country, didn’t have enough problems, what with high unemployment and rampant gangs, crime and methamphetamine abuse. Now, the city of 509,000 in the heart of California’s Central Valley farm country is the epicenter of a plague of copper wire theft afflicting recession-ravaged cities across the country.
“We think we’re a year from having all the lights back,” said Lee Brand, a Fresno City Councilman who devised a plan to thwart thieves by having public works crews entomb the copper wire in over 20,000 maintenance boxes in quick-dry cement. But, he added, “There are a lot of desperate people out there.”AlterNet
Desperate People Ripping Off Copper in One of Our Poorest Cities
Evelyn Nieves
5 comments:
"Pay me now or pay me later."
Hey Bob Roddis, here's an example of failure to create enough fiat DESTROYING "lunches" (infrastructure) already paid for!
In Ireland they've been stealing holy metal relics from our Churches. Some of the relics are hundreds of years old.
This is a sure sign your economy is broken....
It never gets better. So frustrating reading MMT blogs. We understand what is wrong with the economy and we know how to fix it. The data come in month after month as predicted. We do great trading and running businesses using the macro insights but we never get any traction politically or sway the academic orthodoxy from their inaccurate models.
It seems unjust that the entire population be held hostage and an underclass be reduced to scrapping metal from light posts. Makes ya want to bang your head against the wall.
I know he leans way right, but read Victor Davis Hanson about how the central valley has changed over three generations. He is a Stanford prof. and Hoover Inst. fellow, but his perspective on California is compelling as grew up there and has witnessed 60 years of change.
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