Meth to the madness as phone poles stripped for copper
Summary: The wholesale price of copper is rising. It is now up to $3.
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.
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Talkback
Don't be a victim - Buy a gun
You need a new tool. Buy a gun. Get a carry license. They are easy enough to get in Oregon. Don't be a victim. For you I suggest Glock 27. Get back to us when you have stepped up to really oppose criminals instead of just writing about an obvious problem.
On what planet?
Since the vast majority of broadband service in the US currently enters the house through (copper) phone lines and (copper) co-ax, exactly how would using VoIP solve anything? Since the underground co-ax in my neighborhood is quite shallow, they simply have to cut the line where it enters the house and pull it out of the ground. Couldn't take that long for a few people to hit dozens of homes on a street.