July 30th, 2007
Meth to the madness as phone poles stripped for copper
The wholesale price of copper is rising. It is now up to $3.55 a pound. In fact, the scrap market will pay you more than $3 a pound for what is hauled in.
Unfortunately, many of the customers who seek to sell copper to the scrappers are methamphetamine addicts. That’s meth up there at the top of this post.
Meth is, of course, a huge scourge. In my home state of Oregon, it is especially bad. I read and see news reports of home invasions, spousal abuse, fires, etc.- and often meth addiction is a contributing factor.
And now it has hit close to home. I’m talking two counties away from where I am typing this right now.
Karl from BroadbandReports notes that more than 1,000 feet of copper cable was stripped from Verizon Northwest poles in the Bald Peak area northwest of Newberg, Oregon last week. The crime left 149 households temporarily without phone service.
“Thieves working during the night used a vehicle to pull cable loose from two poles, and the tension snapped a third pole off at the base,” Karl cites news accounts as reporting.
Somewhere not so far away from those poles, a tweaker is hittin’ up.
Not to trivialize the problem, but VoIP connections would not have this issue.
Russell Shaw is an enterprise computing journalist, analyst and author based in Portland, Oregon. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
