Off Topic. High Voltage? AC/DC

[can't miss]

Great album, but? if you live in the rural, or travel the back rd's, copper thieves' are busy right now. When I have to go to town, my trip covers a few concessions, and I usually take a different rout each time. Every rd here, were the hydro grid has a ground wire attachment has been scooped. Maybe not transformer attachments right in front of residences, but anywhere else, you can see it missing ground level to about 7 ft, whatever they can reach quick.
Other day took groceries to my folk's, Thamesford to St.T, all the same for the most part.
No expert here, but do know it can cause alot of probs, stray voltage at farms, fuzz on the bell system, high/low rural voltage, heating at house grd's, ect. Curious how wide spread this is?

 

[stomp]

It's a long way to the scrapyard, if you wanna rock 'N' roll...

 

[reeldrag]

It is a common problem
A few copper bandits have been killed cutting ground wires in sub stations
They aren’t the smartest business people
If there not walking they won’t make the fuel cost of collecting and then taking to the scrap yard lol

 

[G.Mech]

The new grounding conductors are copper clad iron. They look the same but they're a bitch to cut and are worthless at the scrap yard. Once all the stolen ones are replaced, maybe it will sort itself out.

 

[hvyhaul]

It's an old and ongoing issue.

Many years back, and I mean a lot of years back, Armbro had set up a portable asphalt plant on 101 west of Timmins. When they got back to the plant after a long weekend, there wasn't a bit of cable left on site.

I got a call, along with many other drivers, all loads are cancelled until Armbro can get the plant recabled and up and running again.

If you've ever seen the amount of cables needed to run one of these plants the cost would be astronomical.

Back then it was the high value of copper, now it could be just to survive.

 

[Twister]

Yep all our grounding is aluminium now. Dirt bags probably got 2 cents for every dollar we had to spend to replace the cooper. Go fentanyl get em.

 

[Dand]

It's not just cables these scumbags are stealing. Just a couple of weeks ago a customer had their full size Chevy van towed in. Customer asked if I could check why his exhaust is so loud. Had a look under the van and found that the catalytic converter had been cut off the thing. Customer called the cops and they told him it wasn't just him that got burned; but they had better then 30 calls for the same type of theft that day and it was only 10 in the morning. The cop gave him an occurrence number and told the customer to call his insurance. It was a 2019 van and by the time I was done replacing the cat the bill was approx $1700.00.

Dan.

 

[Red Fisher]

@Dand : "Scumbags" you are very polite !!!!!!!! We need to do more to them when they are caught. These people are costing us billions of dollars, locking them up doesn't help.

 

[DST]

If you catch someone stealing the stuff and give them shit or a shot in the head like the old days you will be the one that gets the short end of that deal. They will be traumatized from being caught stealing and need therapy and financial support to recover from the incident.

 

[can't miss]

Locally around here, H1 now runs the ground wire down the back side of the pole on new builds where possible. They also staple the shit out of the bottom 10ft of both the grd wire and protective molding, seem's to work some what, to much work for a few ft of wire I guess?

 

[G.Mech]

At the pharmaceutical plant I work for, they lost 600' of copper lighting arrest cable (1/2" diameter), 120 copper lightning rods, and about 2200 feet of 1/0 copper ground conductors from the cable tray power feeders. The thieves spent quite a bit of time on the roofs removing all of it and the cost of replacing it all was about $50k. The lighting cables had to be replaced with copper but the power feeder grounds are all copper clad iron now....very , very sad state of affairs.

 

[Alby]

It's not just cables these scumbags are stealing. Just a couple of weeks ago a customer had their full size Chevy van towed in. Customer asked if I could check why his exhaust is so loud. Had a look under the van and found that the catalytic converter had been cut off the thing. Customer called the cops and they told him it wasn't just him that got burned; but they had better then 30 calls for the same type of theft that day and it was only 10 in the morning. The cop gave him an occurrence number and told the customer to call his insurance. It was a 2019 van and by the time I was done replacing the cat the bill was approx $1700.00.

Dan.

Yeh guess them things are goin for $500 plus each something to do with whats inside kf them a guy told me

 

[G.Mech]

Yeh guess them things are goin for $500 plus each something to do with whats inside kf them a guy told me

That's right, they have platinum inside. The scrap dealers that are buying this stuff own part of this problem too but it's pretty hard to enforce any rules it seems.