In Depth

Red Gold Rush: The Copper Theft Epidemic

Copper has never been more valuable, or more stolen. Inside the metal theft epidemic and CSOs' struggle to contain the problem.

By Scott Berinato

To combat the theft of copper grounds from substations, Dunn at American Electric Power says his company replaced the all-copper grounds with ones that consisted of copper wound around galvanized metal, known as copperweld. The idea was to remove the value of the target; copperweld is worth far less than pure copper grounds. And unwinding the copper from the cheap metal rod, Dunn says, would take hours.

Nevertheless, as soon as he put such a ground in, it was stolen. "They had to have been in there for hours for what? A hundred bucks of copper?" says Dunn.

Some metal thefts like this at first seem bizarre—Herculean efforts put forth for minimal payoff. But they make sense when put in the context of crystal meth. Meth addicts have been known to go on intense and repetitive activity sprees like cleaning a floor with a toothbrush. Carefully unwinding copper seems leisurely by comparison.

Dunn also recalls a rural stretch where someone apparently went utility pole to utility pole cutting off the grounding wire running down the side of the pole as high as the thief could reach, for miles. News stories and authorities from other regions cite further examples: In Arizona, someone climbed a pole and reeled in 4,400 feet of copper wire (a very heavy load) before, apparently, falling off the pole and fleeing, injured, with the wire. In Ohio, 400 feet of aluminum bleachers was nabbed. Three men in Russia used a blowtorch to cut 5-foot sections of narrow-gauge rail from a train line. By the time they were caught, they had cut and hauled 50 tons of it. In one week in the Ukraine, a museum's historic 14.5-ton locomotive was stolen and cut up for scrap, and so was an 11-meter metal bridge, the only road in and out of a town.

A single high dose of crystal meth has been shown to damage nerve terminals in the brains of animals, as have long periods of lower doses. The more one uses meth, the more one needs to use it. Addiction comes rapidly and leads to hard-to-fathom binges. A gram of crystal meth could last a week when you start; on a binge, an addict might take a gram every three hours for several days, without sleep or food, according to NIDA. Addicts become violent and confused and eventually exhibit clinically psychotic symptoms, like paranoia, hallucinations and something called "formication"—the sensation of insects crawling all over the skin.

When addicts stop using crystal meth, they don't suffer physical withdrawal symptoms like the shakes. Instead they are left with depression, fatigue and a craving so intense that they will take extreme measures—climbing utility poles carrying deadly amounts of live electricity, say—to get more.

It's hard for someone sober to comprehend the craving, says Joe Frascella, the director of the Division of Clinical Neuroscience and Behavioral Research at NIDA. To try, he says, imagine holding your breath for one minute. "You get to a point, near the end, where all you can think about is taking a breath," he says. "You're in a panic state. A drive state. Nothing else matters except breathing." In a sense, Frascella says, craving crystal meth is not unlike living in the moment before you drown, for days on end.

It's important to point out that not all meth addicts are metal thieves and, likewise, not all metal thefts track back to meth addicts. No scientific data exists yet that confirms the link between the two, but CSOs and law enforcement say the link exists. Many interviewed for this story mentioned the drug unprompted. Indeed, hot spots of crystal meth abuse—Hawaii, the Southwest, San Diego, Oregon, and increasingly the rural Midwest and South—map to hot spots of metal theft. In local news stories, law enforcement officers make the connection explicit. "Anytime you've got copper thefts, you've got meth problems," said Dakota County Sheriff Don Gudmundson in a September story in the St. Paul Pioneer Press. "One goes with the other." In one Detroit case, officers found a house full of stolen metal and several people living there. One man was shooting up when they found him and asked to finish before they arrested him. "We know drugs are the driving force," says Dunn, who is a retired commander of a narcotics unit in Texas. "I don't think people are stealing copper to buy groceries. I really don't."

More Than Collateral Damage

The link between addicts and metal theft also explains the irrationality behind some of the riskiest metal thefts and their consequences. Thieves may be dishonest, but they are also rational. A thief interested in making money isn't likely to break into a substation, because the risk of death is so high for a reward of only a few hundred dollars' worth of copper. And yet, substations are getting broken into constantly, and live wires are being cut, utility poles being climbed.

"Drugs hijack your motivational systems," NIDA's Frascella explains. "Motivation gets pushed so out of whack."

A crystal meth addict, whether high or craving a high, isn't rational about what constitutes risky behavior. He lacks judgment and can't control his motivations. "This habit removes all the inhibitions you normally have with scary environments, including dangerous equipment like an electrical substation," says Pete Jeter, lead physical security specialist at Bonneville Power in Oregon. This is scientifically true, according to Frascella, who notes that meth affects inhibitory parts of the brain.

Thus, stories of wildly risky metal thefts that lead to death are legion and often harrowing. "I had two fatalities in a 30-day period," Lane says. "Both were cutting wires off the pole. I think the first guy thought he was cutting a de-energized line. The second one is a real mystery, but who knows? We don't have a witness left."

"We had one in Kentucky up on the pole recently," Dunn says. "He cut the wrong wire, got wrapped up in the lines and just hung there upside down, dead, until someone passed by and noticed." Lynch in Detroit mentions "quite a few deaths recently in the city" including one electrocution when a thief was trying to steal live wires out of a traffic box.

In 2006, Jeter remembers, a man broke into a Clark Public Utilities substation and cut out copper grounding wires. Then he apparently bumped his head against a live wire, at which point he became the grounding wire. Seventy-two hundred volts coursed through him, and he burst into flames. The body burned for 45 minutes while engineers turned off the power and let the energy drain out, until it was safe to go in.

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