The Theft of Cables

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The theft of cables is not a problem one encounters in most first world countries but it is riff in South Africa and apart from the huge inconvenience caused to many people in close proximity to the crime it does account for many deaths.

The theft of electrical and telephone cables are a growing and extremely costly problem in this area of the world. These cables are stolen for the money they can generate for the thieves who sell the copper and other metal content to scrap dealers who in turn sell these to larger businesses who export the commodities to other countries, mainly in Asia.

Because copper wire cables can be melted down, are really un-traceable and can be reused, it becomes a very tradable commodity fetching prices based on the World copper prices.

This practice over the last twenty years has cost the power generating authority and Telephone Company millions of dollars in losses. They even spent millions on trying to mark their cables (similar to cattle branding) to encourage the scrape dealers not to purchase marked cables but this has done nothing to diminish the trade.

Although this side of the cable theft problem is measurable in plain dollar terms and is just passed on to the consumer there is darker side to this problem that is even bigger.

Take a recent underground electric cable theft in Johannesburg where thieves vandalized and stole electric cables below street level. The amount of damaged they inflicted in taking out the length of cable caused two substations in the city to go down. This in turn plunged an entire suburb into darkness for several days and forced one of the largest shopping centres in the Southern hemisphere to close for five days. Imagine the financial loses this caused.

Originally this problem was caused by small groups of vandals and un-employed people who just did in to generate a little money for themselves. Typically your local group of hobos and homeless would do this to generate daily cash for their wine food and cigarettes. However, now that the larger and more organised criminal elements have entered the market things have taken a nasty turn; that is the death of innocent people in homes and hospitals that rely on having an uninterrupted supply of electricity for life support. Also lives have been lost because of not being able to use the telephone in an emergency.

Thieving from cables has grown even further with the advent of electricity being brought to the poorest of the poor areas. Here it is not the cables that are being stolen but the content - electricity itself.

The poor are resorting to connecting their appliances directly to the overhead power lines and thus stealing electricity. It is estimated that a person dies every day attempting this kind of theft and during cold snaps the innocent perish. In the recent cold snap in South Africa faulty appliances illegally connected to the overhead cables killed four children.

As you can see from this brief report there is a lot more to the theft of cables than meets the eyes!