New Mexico Business Weekly – by Megan Kamerick NMBW Staff
The thieves are becoming increasingly brazen.
Thefts of copper wire have been on the rise over the past decade. Most copper theft from buildings takes place at night under a cloak of darkness. But recently, tenants in one building ran into several men in the middle of the day. The men told tenants the management company, Asset Management Inc., had called them to repair some electrical wiring.
Then a tenant ran into one of the men again on a Saturday – on the roof.
“He jumped off the roof and went down the drain like a fire pole,” said Norm Ullemeyer with Asset Management.
No damage was done. But Ullemeyer wasn’t so lucky on another building. The damage there will be more than $250,000. Located at 4710 Montgomery NE. The building once housed a China Star restaurant. The thieves went through the roof, ripping apart the heating and cooling units to steal the copper.
The building had no power and no alarm, so once inside, they went to work undetected, stripping the electrical wiring.
Ullemeyer’s team secured the building, but the thieves came back once more. That’s when he called Dave Meurer, owner and CEO of Armed Response Team.
“They’ll come back multiple times because they know the owner has to restore service,” Meurer said.
Copper theft waxes and wanes with the price of the metal. That price has increased more than 500 percent between 2001 and 2008, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Currently, the metal is selling for $3.20 a pound. But the recession apparently has added new incentives for thieves. Meurer called it an epidemic.
The Albuquerque Police Department is launching a new nighttime detective unit that will target property crime, such as copper theft. APD is also working with property management organizations and the construction trades as part of its Safe City partnerships.
Meurer and others suspect the thieves have training in the electrical and building trades, since they know their way around construction sites and are cutting through live wires and risking electrocution — although his team did find a pair of wire cutters welded to a switch at one warehouse.
“I can imagine that person’s still blind,” he said.
A 2008 FBI report warned that copper theft is threatening critical U.S. infrastructure by targeting electrical substations, cellular towers, telephone land lines, water wells, construction sites and vacant homes.
The increased demand for copper is coming from developing nations such as India and China. The demand for copper from China increased substantially because of the construction of facilities for the Beijing Olympics, according to the FBI. A mining accident in Indonesia in 2003 and a mine strike in Chile in 2004 contributed to production shortfalls, too.
The thieves are typically individuals or organized groups who operate independently or in loose association to commit thefts. They could be gang members or drug addicts. A meth addiction costs about $50 a day, noted Meurer.
His company has been working for three years on approaches to curtailing such theft for clients.
Armed Response Team uses a mix of different technologies, including cameras that use a video analytics device that discriminates between, say, a flock of birds and a human form that shouldn’t be there. The systems can run on batteries and send signals by mobile phone.
Meurer’s company dispatches a team, all ex-law enforcement personnel, when an alarm goes off. And while empty buildings are inviting targets, it’s not necessary for thieves to go inside. Nearly every commercial building has electrical service that runs from a transformer up to the exterior of a building. There is a large service disconnect switch, and power runs into the panel.
Thieves typically open the panel, cutting locks if necessary, and pull the wire out of the conduit.
It might bring several hundred dollars’ worth of wire to the burglar, but Meurer has never seen a bill for the damage that owners must pay that is less than $5,000.