Bubba is a 75 year old woman looking to make some extra cash

Thu Apr 7 22:14:31 UTC 2011

We had someone come into a cell site and strip out all the outside 
ground leads. Oddly enough they left the ground bars themselves, which 
would have been much more worthwhile. Maybe they came unprepared and 
only had clippers.

Also, several years ago a building in our area was being renovated, and 
someone snuck in during the night and stripped the wires from the main 
service panel. I wouldn't think the amount of copper there would be 
worth the time, but some people aren't too bright.

We also had a 180' monopole that we replaced, and the crew laid the old 
monopole down on the ground with all the equipment still in place. We 
didn't get to it to remove our antennas for a few weeks, and when we 
did, we found that someone had stripped out 3 runs of 1 5/8" coax from 
inside the tower.

Needless to say, all of our copper reels are locked up to keep them from 
walking off during the night.

I'd think that unless someone could get access to a LOT of copper all at 
one place, and fairly easy to get to, that it wouldn't be worth the time 
and effort.

Jason

On 4/7/2011 1:54 PM, Jeroen van Aart wrote:
> Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote:
>> http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/06/georgian-woman-cuts-web-access 
>>
>
> Babushkas can be quite mean, though mostly it's shopping bags that are 
> their preferred tools of assault. ;-)
>
> From TA:
> "The cable is owned by the Georgian railway network. It is heavily 
> protected"
>
> I don't think that's true, you can't really heavily guard every 
> stretch of cable since it spans such a long distance. There will 
> always be weak spots.
>
> From TA:
> "Pulling up unused copper cables for scrap is a common means of making 
> money in the former Soviet Union."
>
> This is common in the Netherlands too nowadays and other countries too 
> I am sure. Because copper has gone up in price considerably. In the 
> Netherlands especially copper lines along railroad tracks are removed, 
> disabling alert systems with obvious dangerous results.
>
> Regards,
> Jeroen
>