The New York Post reports that copper theft has become so prevalent in Los Angeles that the City's Department of Water and Power wants its own police force to deal with the problem.
The LA Department of Water and Power made the request in a letter sent to the City Council, pointing out that the Port of Los Angeles and Los Angeles airports have their own police authorities.
The agency already employs security guards, but “they lack the authority to detain or arrest suspects, intervene in crimes in progress, conduct searches, or carry firearms for enforcement purposes,” the letter said.
The department currently depends on local law enforcement to respond speedily, but that’s unreliable in remote locations where there is critical infrastructure, it added.
If such an armed force was granted, the department expects to add 20 to 50 officers, who would have the authority to carry a firearm, make arrests and investigate thefts, in addition to handling jobs like dispatch and crime analysis.
The article indicates that wire theft alone costs the city $20 million per year, while setting up such a police force would cost $9 million with an additional $6 million per year operating budget.
Of course the problem is not limited to just Los Angeles as this 2024 article from Wired makes clear: "The Green Economy Is Hungry for Copper—and People Are Stealing, Fighting, and Dying to Feed It." The article begins by recounting an attack on South African utility employees by a gang armed with automatic weapons, adding:
In most places, power companies are a pretty dull business. But in South Africa they are under a literal assault, targeted by heavily armed gangs that have crippled the nation’s energy infrastructure and claimed an ever-growing number of lives. Practically every day, homes across the country are plunged into darkness, train lines shut down, water supplies cut off, and hospitals forced to close, all because thieves are targeting the material that carries electricity: copper.
The battle cry of energy transition advocates is “Electrify everything.” Meaning: Let’s power cars, heating systems, industrial plants, and every other type of machine with electricity rather than fossil fuels. To do that, we need copper—and lots of it. Second to silver, a rarer and far more expensive metal, copper is the best natural electrical conductor on Earth. We need it for solar panels, wind turbines, and electric vehicles. (A typical EV contains as much as 175 pounds of copper.) We need it for the giant batteries that will provide power when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. We need it to massively expand and upgrade the countless miles of power cables that undergird the energy grid in practically every country. In the United States, the capacity of the electric grid will have to grow as much as threefold to meet the expected demand.
A recent report from S&P Global predicts that the amount of copper we’ll need over the next 25 years will add up to more than the human race has consumed in its entire history. “The world has never produced anywhere close to this much copper in such a short time frame,” the report notes. The world might not be up to the challenge. Analysts predict supplies will fall short by millions of tons in the coming years. No wonder Goldman Sachs has declared “no decarbonization without copper” and called copper “the new oil.”
As the energy transition gathers speed, the value of copper has also soared. In the past four years, the price of a ton of copper has shot from about $6,400 to more than $9,000. That, in turn, has made electrical wiring, equipment, and even raw metal fresh from the mines into juicy targets for thieves. All around the world, hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of the metal has been stolen—and countless lives have been lost. With the possible exception of gold, no other metal has caused so much death and destruction.
After describing expanding copper production in Africa and environmental impacts of a huge open pit copper mine in Chile, the article returns to copper theft:
The treasures these mines produce are magnets for some astonishingly brazen criminals. By the light of the full moon, bandits in Toyota Tundra pickups roll up alongside trains that are hauling copper slabs from the mines high in the Atacama down to the coast. With perhaps a whispered prayer to the spirits of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the bandits leap aboard the copper cars, slice through the ropes securing the 180-pound slabs, toss them into the beds of the speeding trucks, and disappear into the night.
The problem is so acute that the Chilean national police have set up a special copper task force. But trains were still being robbed regularly when I visited Chile in 2022. And not just trains, for that matter. In January of 2023, a team of thieves hit the country’s main seaport, overpowered a handful of workers, and made off with a dozen containers full of Codelco’s copper—more than $4 million worth.
No one knows exactly how much copper is stolen every year across the world. Thieves typically sell their wares to no-questions-asked scrapyards and recyclers, who strip off cable coatings and other nonmetallic materials and then shred or melt down the copper. Anyone can do it: The metal can be melted with blowtorches or small furnaces you can buy on Amazon. There are plenty of online videos that can walk you through the process. Once rendered into generic form, stolen copper can be mixed with legally obtained metal. At that point it’s easy to sell into the regular market, its origin essentially impossible to trace.
It’s safe to say, however, that the amount stolen each year is many, many millions of dollars’ worth—possibly billions. In one particularly audacious theft in 2023, nearly $200 million worth of copper and other metals was lifted from Aurubis, Europe’s largest producer. The biggest heists, at least in the US, are often inside jobs. In 2013, police shut down a ring that had ripped off as much as $80 million worth of copper ingots from an Arizona mine. Prosecutors said that workers in on the scheme would open the gates for trucks driven by their confederates, who loaded them up with raw copper and drove right back out. The metal was sold to recyclers in California, who blackened it to make it look like scrap and then shipped it to China. Unraveling the plot took nerve. At one point, a company rep from the mine found a severed goat’s head nailed to his door.
Most American copper thieves, however, are small-time opportunists drawn to a laughably easy score. So much copper is just left out in the open. It doesn’t take much skill or daring to tear out wiring in an abandoned building, break open an air conditioner sitting behind an apartment block, or snatch a manhole cover on a quiet suburban street. Thousands of copper thefts are reported each year. The booty includes fire hydrants, a 3,000-ton bell, a bust of Orville Wright, and at least one urn containing human ashes.
The cost of fixing the damage often far exceeds the value of the stolen metal. Ripped-out cables have shut down drinking water supplies in Hawaii, streetlights in Missouri, airport runway lights in Washington, and whole subway lines in New York City. The US Department of Energy has estimated that copper theft causes $1 billion worth of damage every year to facilities and businesses considered critical infrastructure.
Then there’s the shocking number of lives lost. Again, no one knows the exact numbers, but just from scanning through 10 years or so of local news articles I found dozens of reports of Americans who were fatally electrocuted while trying to steal live copper wire. And at least one security guard who was murdered trying to stop one of those thefts.
In South Africa, though, widespread poverty, ineffective police, and soaring metal prices have turned copper theft into a major industry. Mines are rich targets, even those that don’t extract copper. Their subterranean networks of shafts and tunnels need power to run lights and digging equipment. That power, of course, is carried by miles of electric cable, conveniently left unguarded and out of sight. On any given day, hundreds of desperate people are risking their lives to get that metal.
They’re known as zama zamas—roughly meaning “take a chance” in Zulu. These illegal miners clamber down mine shafts on ropes or handmade ladders, then make their way into the tunnels. There, they set up underground camps. Hundreds of zama zamas may be living underground at any given time, some spending weeks or even months down in the tunnels.
It’s an astonishingly common and deeply disruptive crime. A single mining company, Implats, reported around 800 incidents of cable theft in 2021. Stolen cables have forced companies to shut down mines for weeks at a time.
It’s also a phenomenally dangerous way to earn a living. Illegal miners have died by the dozens in gas explosions, floods caused by heavy rains, and other accidents. In 2021, a mining company sealed off a ventilation shaft that a group of zama zamas was using to supply their compatriots underground. Desperate, the miners blew open the hole with explosives. Police and private security guards wound up in a pitched battle with the escaping zama zamas. At least eight people were killed.
Above ground, gangs have hijacked dozens of trucks carrying copper to South Africa’s ports, making off with millions of dollars’ worth of metal. Meanwhile, the electric grid is being plundered so often and so thoroughly that the whole country is affected. In 2021, the railway company Transnet reported that more than 1,000 kilometers of overhead power cables had been stolen. A recent report from the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime notes that “while two security guards may have proved a deterrent in the past,” gangs “now come in groups of 20 or 30 and are often heavily armed, with ‘spotters’ shooting at patrol vehicles.” Cell phone towers, water pipelines, and electric power stations are similarly under assault. Thieves disguise themselves as workers dispatched to tear up underground cables, or bribe actual power company employees, or just show up brandishing guns and use four-wheel-drive trucks to rip cables out of the ground.
Ordinary South Africans pay a heavy price. Children have died falling into manholes after their covers were stolen. In addition to disrupted train lines and power, water, and phone service outages, a Johannesburg hospital was kept closed after someone stole its copper pipes, cables, and electrical equipment. Police believe rivalry between gangs involved in stealing cables spurred two mass shootings that left 21 people dead in the Johannesburg area in 2022. And a number of security guards trying to protect some company’s copper have also been wounded or killed—like Moqadi Mokoena, the Johannesburg guard shot to death in his truck.
The wave of copper theft has sparked a backlash of vigilante violence in some impoverished townships. Suspected thieves have been assaulted, beaten and occasionally lynched. “This is the only language that criminals understand,” a resident of a town where an alleged cable thief was beaten to death told local media. In March of 2023, four electric company workers were killed in a Johannesburg suburb by a mob that mistook them for cable thieves.
The solution to all of this suggested by the writer is to focus on copper demand. And this means that rather than shifting from gas powered vehicles to electric vehicles, which will consume even more copper, that we build out "public transit, subsidized ebikes, and developed more walkable cities[.]"
The Wired article indicates, however, that we have exploited the largest, easiest to mine, deposits. But that may not be the case. In March of this year, the discovery of one of the world's largest deposits was discovered in Argentina. Popular Mechanics reports: "Geologists May Have Found One of the World’s Greatest Treasures. Some Say It’s Too Dangerous to Dig Up."
Located
along the border of Chile and Argentina, the Filo del Sol copper
deposit has been under investigation for years for potentially being one
of the largest copper deposits in the world. And that makes sense,
considering this treasure is nestled along the Atacama Desert—long known
for its immense copper reserves due to its location in the Andes and its placement within the eastern portion of the Ring of Fire.
However,
an initial mineral resource estimate completed in 2025 suggests that
the companies in charge of mining this area—the U.S.-based Lundin Mining
and BHP—may have stumbled upon five times more metal than they bargained for.
According to a statement from Lundin Mining, the assessment estimates
the presence of up to 13 million tonnes of copper, 907,000 kilograms (32
million ounces) of gold,
and 18.6 million kilograms (659 million ounces) of silver. This update,
gathered from data collected from 400 additional exploration holes,
came from the discovery that deeper mineralization of copper far
exceeded the estimates that were closer to the surface. According to
AFP, Filo del Sol could prove to be richer still, as experts dig deeper and explore the resource’s northern and southern boundaries.
It is the altitude at which the deposits sit that make it potentially dangerous to mine.
And last year, Newser reported on a new copper mine in Arizona expected to come online in late 2028.
So not all is doom and gloom.
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