Material change should foil area copper thieves

A recent change at Heartland REC is designed to thwart criminals who steal electrical wiring for resale as scrap.
Gounding wire that used to be solid copper is being replaced with copper-clad-steel, which has no resale value.
The change comes as two copper theft incidents highlight the need for action against scrap metal thieves.
In the first incident, two Southeast Kansas radio stations, KRPS and KKOW went off the air as a single thief ripped out wire at the station’s tower site in the early morning hours of Wednesday, September 7.
The incident began close to 12:30 a.m., when Heartland Rural Electric Cooperative was alerted to an outage at a KRPS radio tower within a mile of Scammon. Heartland staff quickly realized that the tower had been vandalized by a copper thief.
Several hours later, Cherokee County Sheriff’s deputies responded to a possible theft in progress at a residence north of Columbus on Kansas Highway 7. According to a police report, the homeowner saw the suspect and held him at gunpoint until law enforcement officers arrived. Officers then arrested Jeff Blake, 39, rural Scammon, and discovered the copper wiring stolen from the radio tower in Blake’s vehicle.
Blake was taken into custody in the Cherokee County Jail on $11,000 bond for felony theft and felony criminal damage to property, as well as a no-bond hold from the Kansas Department of Corrections.
Another attempted theft took place at the cooperative’s Parker substation, located in Linn County, northwest of Mound City. There, copper thieves broke into the fenced substation and did approximately $40,000 worth of damage to the equipment there. Careless cutting of the wires by the thieves led to high voltage surging through substation equipment which then caught fire, scaring off the thieves before they had a chance to load up the wire.
In addition to the high costs of repairing damage and replacing stolen material, these thefts can hurt the Cooperative’s system reliability. The biggest danger to thieves, of course, is that a lot of people are killed every year when they are electrocuted. Just last month, copper thieves were electrocuted in Pennsylvania, Louisiana, Ohio, Kentucky and Texas during attempted thefts of copper wire.
The best way to fight this crime is for the public to remain alert and to notify authorities if they observe suspicious activity. If there’s a truck next to a substation, and it doesn’t have the Heartland REC logo on it, especially if it’s in the middle of the night, members of the public are encouraged to be suspicious and call Heartland REC at 1-800-835-9586, or the local police.

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