Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Retired Dallas, TX Copper Thieves (graphic)

Kinda reminds me of what happens when you leave Twinkie in the deep fat fryer too long

I dont know where this happened but it didnt happen over last weekend. I received these pictures around 2 months ago from a buddy too. One thing about it, they wont be doin' that again.

DB

Well, there's TWO that saves the taxpayers a trial. And an added bonus: there won't be recidivism...

Serves 'em right..

I hope those are the same ones who stole all the copper wiring from the lights at the sports complex in McKinney.

they should have stolen a voltage tester first.

The gene pool gets a little chlorine added from time to time.

guess they should have tried a better occupation that stealing for a living.

You gonna go hang 'em from a tree, and burn a cross while you're at it?
Make it a party!

That is Little Les!

No, but I know enough about electricity and electronics to know that no phone company on earth has ever used the kind of voltage it would take to do that. Clearly caused by contacting a high voltage power line.

A little searching turned up this:

http://message.snopes.com/showthread.php?t=54615

It seems like many internet sensations, the original link is lost. There have been several copper thieves electrocuted in the past decade.

Jerry

if there was no meter on that line,they should charge the next of kin with theft of sevices for the power that killed them.

I never claimed that they were electrocuted by the phone cable,you did... I'm in the phone business Jerry...You think I might have a clue about what I see?
Do you have a clue what was in those pictures except a couple of crispy brothers?

So is the thnking one dude climbed the pole, cut the hot lines one at a time (he would have been insulated if the pole was dry and he kept away from the ground wire, sort of like the bird pearching on one wire), the multi part cable fell, then as they were trying to pull the cable out of the ground conduit, they got in contact with the hot cables?

Otherwise I am having problems knowing why the cables have a nice cut and are on the ground, looks like they were at the top of the pole at one time. The photos on snopes show the three cable ends and a fourth cable with burned off insulation. I am guessing this was an underground lead coming out of a sub and feeding a string of poles.

And from the snopes photos, it is not a phone cable, looks like black plastic semi rigid casing that melted around the guys. The melted portion looks like rubber, which it is not. The remainder of the casing looks just like the one in front of my house where a 13,900 feed comes out of the ground and goes up a pole. There is a cable at the one guys foot with the insulation burned off, my guess is he stepped on the hot cable and provided a nice ground path.

Some career paths are a dead end, others just cause job related burn out.

Alan

WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

I wonder what they were thinking.In Every substation that I have been in you could hear the 60cycle hum.And you can feel it in the air on humid days.Like we don't turn it off at night,man! Lightman

They were thinking about their next score of cyrstal meth I would guess. They probably couldn't distinguish between the 60 Hz hum you speak of and the hum inside their fried brains (not to be confused with the final fry seen in the photos ).

So what is a 12B-1 stub?

Some of our main trunk cables are still pressurised in that manner, as are many of the cables between the exchange and the"cab" (PCP) on the side of the road..In fact one of the first indications of a potential fault is the air pressure dropping in the cable and setting off an alarm in the exchange..The nominal voltage our system runs on is 50V DC although ringing tone represents bursts of about 120v and is more than enough to get your attention when your working at the top of a pole!

Cable theft over here is a major,major problem...I am not just talking about idiots as in the pics above, but gangs who go around posing as Contractors (including the vehicles) and set up road works ect and drag out hundreds of meters of live cable...Its just one of the reasons we are looking at replacing copper with fibre although that will take years to do..

You sound like you are in the phone business Pete...