An Ohio Valley 100k-watt FM signal is severed in broad daylight

https://www.radioworld.com/news-and-business/headlines/an-ohio-valley-100000-watt-fm-signal-is-severed-in-broad-daylight

by pkaeding • 2 months ago

209 271 2 months ago

radioworld.com

grahamburger• 2 months ago

Oof, that's a bad day. I've had cable stolen from a tower site like that, but it was cable we had spooled out for installation the day before, not in active use.

AndrewKemendo4• 2 months ago

That’s wild. Radio transmission power is no joke.

I replaced the 100W FM transmitter on our college radio tower and got in front of the emitter beam for like 10 seconds and my head rung for a week. The amps and power aren’t to be messed with.

I can’t even imagine messing with 100K line that’s a solid block of copper

asdefghyk2• 2 months ago

Very lucky not to have been killed by the high voltages or intense RF energy and or suffer severe burns / blindness ....

AndrewKemendo4• 2 months ago

Come to think of it it wasn’t even 10 seconds, more like 2 or 3 before my ears and eyes were burning

sidewndr462• 2 months ago

You think exposure to 100 watts at ~100 MHz is going to cause your head to ring?

fc417fc802• 2 months ago

Are you saying it won't? What sort of RF power density in the FM range can the human body tolerate without noticeable effect?

7402• 2 months ago

I'm surprised.

Consulting an exposure limit calculator (https://www.arrl.org/rf-exposure-calculator) suggests a safe distance (FCC controlled exposure limit) for continuous (30 min) exposure from a 100w FM transmitter antenna at 100 MHz with, say, 5 dB gain is around 5 ft. For a brief exposure it's much less.

Amateur radio operators need to know this, since 100w is quite a typical power level, and they have bands (50 MHz and 144 MHz) not far from commercial FM.

How far away from the antenna were you? The antenna is usually far away from the transmitter that you were replacing.

AndrewKemendo4• 2 months ago

Maybe like 1-2 feet away i was manually adjusting something on the top of a 8 foot radio tower on vandenburg hall at USAFA.

legitronics• 2 months ago

How is this person alive? That’s a terrifying amount of relatively high frequency energy. And pressurized gasses of some sort.

defrost• 2 months ago

My first thought also .. possibly pulled a breaker rendering cable inert, or perhaps rigged a remote cutting tool - drop saw poised to cut on a long extension cord ready to be turn on ... (problematic).

I'm leaning toward killed the current first somehow, but very location detail dependant.

cucumber37328425• 2 months ago

You can buy high voltage gear online cheap. Just this one job would pay for the complete setup if you're buying cheap brands.

CamperBob25• 2 months ago

The transmitter will have a VSWR trip for just this sort of eventuality. It would likely be damaged severely if allowed to operate into an open circuit for more than a brief moment.

api• 2 months ago

Meth induced superhero powers?

helterskelter• 2 months ago

Darwin awards should give this guy an honorable mention.

CamperBob25• 2 months ago

The alleged perpetrator — Paul Crisp

Nominative determinism in action.

fwipsy• 2 months ago

Or subverted in this case, I suppose. Can't have been very crisped if he could flee from the police.

arthurcolle• 2 months ago

any paulcrisp on HN want to discuss?

trick-or-treat• 2 months ago

Reads like a super-villain origin story. Welp, I guess he doesn't have to worry about getting the electric chair.

asdefghyk2• 2 months ago

The photo shows a cable ( with insulation ) that looks at least 4 inches thick ... (from a distance )

tedd4u• 1 month ago

Probably something like this:

HJ9HP-50 Heliax High-Power Air-Dielectric Coax

https://www.alldataresource.com/Commscope-HJ9HP-50-HJ9-50-HE...

dylan6043• 2 months ago

I'm looking for a Kalshi bet that the perp is a tweaker.

They say it could cost $70,000 - $100,000 to repair, but I also wonder if they'll have to refund ad buys while they are running at 10 watts and such reduced coverage. Makes me also wonder what kind of insurance broadcasters might have for such incidents when they can't broadcast.

ben-gy• 2 months ago

This feels like force majeur from a contract perspective…

CamperBob25• 2 months ago

Is it too soon to talk about regulating the $#@* out of scrap-metal dealers?

SoftTalker3• 2 months ago

They already are. You need to show ID to sell scrap metal. The thieves use a fence.

CamperBob25• 2 months ago

Where does the fence sell the scrap? Somebody is buying it.

gacgacgac2• 2 months ago

Furthermore, going after scrap metal sites makes an important business harder and fails to be inquisitive enough about the reasons why the thefts happen at all. Maybe we should try to understand why people are stealing copper. (Presumably poverty, drug addiction, lack of opportunity)

BobbyTables2• 2 months ago

Wonder if they steal the fence too!

julian_sark• 2 months ago

Didn't know fences contained copper ;)

quickthrowman• 2 months ago

You need a license to sell more than $25 of copper in my state. You won’t be issued a copper selling license without holding something like a journeyman electrical worker license or similar.

In practice, it just means the copper gets driven to Wisconsin and sold there. It’d be nice if my neighbor state gave a shit about metal theft or discouraging drunk driving, but they don’t.

aeonik• 2 months ago

Working backwards from clues in the article, thief maybe stole 200-400 ft of wire.

Assuming between 3-1/8″ - 6-1/8″ diameter.

Somewhere between $1,360 - $6,400 of scrap value. $70k-$100k to repair...

Absurd.

cucumber37328425• 2 months ago

Somewhere between $1,360 - $6,400 of scrap value

If it's a "normal" wire specification that someone else can use it was likely sold for ~50% of retail.

bragr• 2 months ago

Thieves typically burn off the insulation so it's not likely to be easily reused.

tonyarkles• 2 months ago

It was gas-filled presumably ultra low loss RF cable, but the thief cut it into small sections so that they could take it away. You might be right about the 50% number of they had somehow managed to steal it as a single intact spool. As-is, the station even said that they wouldn’t be able to use it even now that it’s been recovered because of fears of gas leaks.

sowbug• 2 months ago

That's the usual car stereo theft economics: cause $1,000 of damage to sell a $100 radio for $10.

m463• 2 months ago

probably $10 of meth to harm a body so that it eventually needs $50k of medical work, or $100k of dental work

fortran772• 2 months ago

And people think it's OK because it's "equity".

xp848• 2 months ago

Other than those who commit grave offenses of bodily harm, I reserve my greatest disgust for the type of dirtbag who imposes these orders-of-magnitude greater costs on other innocent people for such a relatively low "reward." They'd burn the Mona Lisa for fuel, melt down the Statue of Liberty for scrap, anything if you let them.

I agree with another commenter here, the overlap of this mindset with tweakers is large.

mslt• 2 months ago

I’d suggest considering empathy once you get past the anger, their former selves would be equally repulsed by their behavior, and for many I expect their current selves feel similarly despite their lack of control. The villains here aren’t the broken people.

bandofthehawk2• 2 months ago

In general I agree with you, but it also makes me wonder how these people got to this point. I think most people would burn the Mona Lisa if it meant surviving through a cold night. Our society has failed these people in many ways.

vostrocity• 2 months ago

A topic I'm interested in that is upstream of what you're saying is the propagation of meaning. If somebody has no idea what the Mona Lisa or the Statue of Liberty are, then we can't really bemoan that they would not ascribe any value to it beyond its raw material.

themafia3• 2 months ago

They didn't ask to be born and have never been given an opportunity to approve the society they're born into. The price of non-conformance is deprivation, punishment and incarceration. We should rethink this.

NoMoreNicksLeft2• 2 months ago

This could be made a serious felony. If the thief doesn't plan for or attempt to get say, 25% of fair market value or replacement cost (whichever is higher), multiply the penalty by 5 years, no chance of parole.

Though I don't know if there are enough prisons for all those stealing catalytic converters.

pjc503• 1 month ago

Or as mentioned upthread, a Henry Moore statue was stolen for scrap.

odiroot• 1 month ago

Don't ever read about the Red Army marching west (and plundering) through Europe. You'll get a heart attack.

johanvts3• 2 months ago

Why hasn’t the economist of the world figured out a solution to this problem. There has to be a better way when both sides would be better off by just paying the theif double. Some kind of proof of work system to show that you really are crazy enough to do the crime maybe.

NewJazz3• 2 months ago

The person needs to have a stake in the infrastructure OR there needs to be a high chance of them getting caught and losing something. People with little stake in a community will strip infrastructure bare. Inequality is a significant root cause here.

jcgrillo2• 2 months ago

Or pay a guard a fair wage and comp them the $0.20 or whatever for each bullet..

EDIT: to be clear I'm not saying it should be that way, but there was a time not long ago when this was the normal way to handle the situation. I'd argue the present arrangement is more civilized.

tshaddox2• 2 months ago

Isn’t the most obvious response from economics that the crime needs to be made more expensive? In other words, the likelihood of being harmed while attempting the crime needs to be much higher.

If a quarter of the people who tried a comparable theft got thrown in jail for 2 years and another quarter got shot by a security guard, I suspect attempts would be rare.

The financial damage done by the thief is presumably irrelevant to the thief, beyond the fact that sentencing is probably stricter for bigger thefts.

themafia3• 2 months ago

Why hasn’t the economist of the world figured out a solution to this problem.

They have. It's called insurance. The problem here might be the change in copper prices which possibly increased the value of the line and which were never properly reassessed for coverage.

better off by just paying the theif double.

You could also just require a license to scrap copper. That people can show up with a suspicious pile of metal and convert into cash seems to be what creates the opportunity for the thief.

that you really are crazy enough to do the crime maybe.

We shouldn't motivate people to extremes. We should probably just punish drug dealers far more harshly in this country.

zeafoamrun• 2 months ago

I prefer the 9mm solution

lmm2• 2 months ago

Why hasn’t the economist of the world figured out a solution to this problem.

Because the only solutions that work are social.

There has to be a better way when both sides would be better off by just paying the theif double. Some kind of proof of work system to show that you really are crazy enough to do the crime maybe.

Kipling has a poem about that one, it doesn't work out.

driverdan• 2 months ago

From an economics perspective the solution is to legalize everything. Black markets cause incentives like this.

narrator3• 1 month ago

This is called prison, but that's pushing the easy button which is strictly forbidden.

dfxm12• 1 month ago

It's not an economy problem, it's a policy problem. We can choose to treat drug addiction like a disease. We can choose to give people health care. We can choose to give people money to keep their lives together. Law makers would rather this happen though.

ohyes• 1 month ago

The solution is inexpensive drugs for addicts, minimum standard of living, programs for getting off drugs. But there’s an incentive to make drugs expensive and people desperate, and to punish people for their “failures” rather than forgiving and helping.

It is cheaper to avoid the situation by structuring society in a way that people aren’t willing to steal copper for quick money.

etskinner• 1 month ago

I thought about this when my catalytic converter was stolen. Part of me was like "maybe I should just strap a two $100 bills onto it with a note pleading them not to take it. But then, of course, the type of person to steal a converter is also the type of person that would take the $200 AND steal the converter

Tangurena2• 1 month ago

That is one point made in the essay *Million Dollar Murray". This Malcolm Gladwell essay is nominally about power law distributions, but also makes the point about homelessness, drug abuse and car emissions/pollutions. Denver is one domestic city that has a small program that hands apartment keys to homeless people. "Murray" cost the public health system at least one million dollars during his lifetime.

rsynnott2• 1 month ago

There's the criminal guilds approach from Discworld, I suppose (in which thieves, assassins etc are regulated and given quotas). May be some practical problems.

jjmarr• 1 month ago

The economics solution is to legalize drugs and give addicts an unlimited supply.

Addicts do not want money, they are doing this because they have a near-perfectly inelastic demand for drugs. Satisfy the demand and they'll will get high all day + opt out of society.

general1465• 2 months ago

The bigger absurdity is when thief mistakes bunch of fiber for copper wires and then whole countries can go offline

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-12985082

Symbiote2• 1 month ago

In the Russian far east, where it's not practical to bury cables, many roadside bars have small signs showing a piece of fibre cable and how it's worthless for scrap.

freeopinion4• 2 months ago

Considering that stolen wire carries a lot of risk, the market value is considerably less than normal scrap prices. I've seen thefts that required special equipment like cranes and probably 10 man hours to recon, plan, and execute. All for probably less than $200 net when it was all done. But the repairs cost tens of thousands.

So some places put up Flock cameras... only to get them vandalized.

rayiner2• 1 month ago

Theft is a very inefficient tax on civilization.

khafra2• 1 month ago

Some theft is efficient. If a hypothetical thief grabs a few bills from an unattended wallet, and the wallet's owner wasn't counting on having a specific amount of money available soon after, the amount lost by the victim is roughly equal to the amount gained by the thief.

Stealing copper from power lines and transformers is among the least-efficient kinds theft; it's hard to do worse without shooting a wealthy philanthropist couple to steal a wallet and a pearl necklace. I have seen a term suggested--the "rapacity index"--for the ratio of value gained by the thief, to value lost by the victim. I think it makes sense to take a crime's rapacity index into consideration during sentencing.

rmason• 2 months ago

In Detroit copper theft was an epidemic a few years back. Once the easy stuff in abandoned houses was gone thieves went further afield. .

A few brave thieves went after power substations. For some thieves a lack of knowledge was fatal.

https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/detroit/2017...

enoint• 2 months ago

An example shown when I worked around a 7000A rail was also two men. One formed a circuit and the other tried to pry him off.

niccl• 1 month ago

Darwin Award recipients!

mikeweiss• 2 months ago

Wait a second, I just realized something... how much would the station be paying in electricity to transmit at 100,000 watts 24/7 ? Their electric bill must be like $200,000 per year??

RF_Enthusiast• 2 months ago

It’s 100,000 watts ERP with a 6 bay antenna. The higher gain antenna means the transmitter output power would be much less (about 35 kw), although at still extremely dangerous levels to mess with.

Vaslo• 2 months ago

The trash thief will never be able to replace that. I guess insurance will help but that’s just another excuse for them to raise rates.

That thief should be indentured until he pays it back in full.

geerlingguy• 2 months ago

Cutting a live transmission line is incredibly foolish, for many reasons, but I'm guessing the station has a modern(ish) solid state transmitter, which has great foldback protection.

I've seen (and personally tested) AM transmitters dead shorting, and within less than a second (probably less than 100ms, but I haven't measured precisely) it will fold back on a dead short to like 1% of its operating power, lower if it still detects a short.

This is to protect the (even more expensive) transmitter from lightning strikes or other weird eventualities (like the line leaking pressurized nitrogen, used to prevent shorts from moisture mainly).

But replacing that 3" transmission line is not cheap or fast. Usually the runs are planned and designed, and every elbow / connection has losses that are accounted for.

Schlagbohrer2• 1 month ago

The article mentions it will cost around $160 per foot to replace, totalling $70k to 100k

ErroneousBosh3• 1 month ago

I know a guy who works for a major broadcast site company here in the UK, who caught some people up at a remote transmitter site by blocking their pickup in with his van. They admitted they were there to steal copper scrap. He gave them about 100kg of scrap aluminium (decommissioned aerials) that had been subject to the usual "We'll come and get it next week, next week, oh so busy this week, how about next week, maybe the week after?" from the people that were supposed to pick them up.

Then he offered to give them a tour of the transmission building.

"See that?" he said, pointing to some nice thick copper cabling, "if you touched that you'd die, instantly. And see that over there? Yeah, if you touch that, you'd die. That stuff there, too, kill you if you even went near it."

Then he pointed out the big polished copper waveguide going up to the main TX stack, think in terms of a thick copper 4" sewer pipe leading out through the building.

"See that, know what would happen if you touched *that*?"

"We'd die?"

"Naaaaaw, of course you wouldn't die! Your arms would vapourise looooong before your heart stopped!"

userbinator• 2 months ago

This isn't just any regular copper cable:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coaxial_cable#Hard_line

silexia2• 2 months ago

The criminal will be out in a few months to strike again I'm sure.

Ylpertnodi2• 1 month ago

So, prison doesn't work?

silexia2• 1 month ago

Prison works if they never get out, see El Salvador's successes. Death penalty works too.

cpncrunch2• 2 months ago

Looks like this guy has a history of drug trafficking: https://wchstv.com/news/local/deputies-boyd-county-man-charg...

cpncrunch2• 2 months ago

Oddly downvoted?!

bArray2• 2 months ago

I'm surprised nothing more serious happened. There was obviously a serious electrocution risk, but I think that is the easiest bit to deal with. 100kW of radio waves, whilst non-ironising, can still microwave you. With 100kW there could have also been a serious reflection back to the transmitter. This guy cutting the cable is far luckier than he will ever know.

ordu• 2 months ago

I like your typo. Seriously, non-ironising.

bArray2• 1 month ago

Somewhat ionical.

elzbardico• 2 months ago

How the fuck is the thief alive????

silisili• 2 months ago

Kentucky for some reason has an epidemic of this. My father lives in the middle of nowhere in a perfectly safe area, yet still at least once or twice a year someone steals the phone or power lines leading to outages. I live in a similar area in another state and it's nearly unheard of.

I wish they'd up the severity of these crimes - people willing to damage infrastructure for everyone else just to make drug money are not conducive to a functional society.

ProAm• 2 months ago

It's meth.

Loughla• 1 month ago

We live in a very rural, incredibly safe area. You can always tell when someone else gets hooked on meth. Their place goes to shit, step 1. Their kids get dirty, step 2. You start to see things like car batteries or tools disappear from nearby farms, step 3. They die or go to jail after trying to steal something big, like electric lines or even train rails in one instance, step 4.

At least with heroine, they tend to just keep to themselves. Meth makes sure they have the energy and drive to really fuck with other people.

pjc503• 1 month ago

people willing to damage infrastructure for everyone else

Cable theft is particularly destructive because it's so value-destroying. $100k of cable destroyed for a maximum profit of $1k.

Or in this particularly egregious UK case, a multimillion pound artwork destroyed for £1,500 scrap value: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2009/may/17/henry-m...

I also think that stereotypes make people underestimate rural crime. There may not be a lot of people, but the per capita crime rate can be just as high as urban areas, and the under-reporting issues can be worse. Lots of invisible drug trafficing or manufacture/growing. Lots of thefts of ag equipment. Even the occasional theft of livestock, a crime from pre-history.

Then there's the both essential and illegal use of immigrants who have been imported for the purpose without work permits and may be held in coercive and unpleasant conditions.

expedition32• 1 month ago

The Netherlands had a lot of problems with people stealing copper lines. Eventually the government made a deal with scrapyards- they were traditionally run by somewhat shady people.

stronglikedan• 1 month ago

a multimillion pound artwork destroyed for £1,500 scrap value

I think a more apt comparison would be the retail value of the metal compared to the scrap value, since the "multimillion" is more of a subjective artistic value. Egregious nonetheless.

picofarad• 1 month ago

Didn't we use to hang cattle rustlers?

wildzzz2• 1 month ago

We had an antenna range built inside of a shipping container. We had some pretty fancy copper cladding that had some pricey dielectric inside of it. Somehow, a copper thief found it and stole all of the cladding. That stuff was probably worth 1000x its copper scrap value. I'm sure the thief was expecting to find some equipment to pawn but instead opened up a treasure chest.

FatherOfCurses• 1 month ago

It's a mystery to me why the scrap metal industry doesn't have more scrutiny given how much copper is stolen.

MisterTea2• 1 month ago

Years ago we were cleaning out our shop and had to scrap a lot of metal. At the scrap yard in Brooklyn there was a separate line for copper and aluminum vs iron and steel which was mostly a bulk dump job. Seemed like half of the line were homeless and destitute people. Many had shopping carts full of various pieces of aluminum and whatever, lots of AC condensers and copper tubing. There was a couple ahead of me, skinny, toothless, ragged and smelled of BO and urine were holding a few bundles of AV cables and an old extension cord in their hands - a scene of desperation.

The problem with policing scrap yards is you can't prove anyone stole anything. You could limit who can drop off scrap but then you create incentives for those people to purchase illicit scrap and pass it off as legit.

burnt-resistor• 1 month ago

It seems to happen most in economically-desperate areas or where there are drug addicts. It's the same sort of shit like after the fall of the Berlin Wall, like when live power lines were stolen in Moscow. A whole family watching TV and suddenly the lights go out unexpectedly... but it's because someone has taken the power lines for money. Infrastructure cannibalism seems to happen whenever there's insufficient security/prosecution and/or excessive desperation.

Schlagbohrer2• 1 month ago

Upping the severity of punishment will be as effective as the war on drugs was, that is to say not one bit. You'd need to reduce poverty to prevent this kind of thing.

4gotunameagain• 1 month ago

This is not true, it is a false analogy. The war on drugs has been a definite failure, but we can see the effects of lower punishment for low hanging crimes in the decriminalization of shoplifting in california.

testing223212• 1 month ago

Kentucky for some reason has an epidemic of this

The link between poverty and crime has been a stab listed for centuries

dmitrygr2• 1 month ago

https://www.independent.org/article/2026/05/18/does-poverty-...

fred_is_fred• 1 month ago

"Kentucky for some reason has an epidemic of this."

Meth.

dmitrygr2• 1 month ago

  > for some reason

Do the perps get prosecuted? Do the places that buy stolen copper? Is it publicized? Are punishments large enough to provide a detriment? Are repeat offenders properly contained long term? No? Well then ... it's a mystery

pixl977• 1 month ago

The for some reason is a meth epidemic.

Do the perps get prosecuted?

Pretty often, but drug addicts are rather senseless and do stuff anyway.

Do the places that buy stolen copper?

Sometimes. Like any criminal enterprise there are groups that launder stolen metals and turn them into 'good' metals.

Are punishments large enough to provide a detriment

Depending on what you do, it can be a felony, which in this case is likely 1-5 years, with each repeat offense adding more.

https://www.wdrb.com/news/louisville-mayor-signs-new-ordinan...

the TL;DR here is the theft is a second order effect that you're not going to stop because the people that are doing it are horrifically addicted to meth which overrides any idea in their brain but doing something to get them more meth.

ncr100• 1 month ago

Anecdotes, observation, and a wish:

Locally here in Seattle Greenwood neighborhood, there is a performing arts theater. Acting and such. On the roof of the building lives the air conditioners.

People got up there destroyed the air conditioners took the copper and now the building has to $100,000 to like a million dollars (??) to rebuild their air conditioning.

It's a moderately popular place but it's small so I don't see how this is going to work out well for them.

They had a giant fire not too many years ago and the rebuild and I assume they're still paying for that.

I have observed the local drug users [sometimes housed, there is a "friendly" house nearby] are often seen, by me and others, passing through the nearby alleys, setting up places to work, stripping little thin bits of plastic housing from wire cables that they have stolen. I've talked to them and they are real people but they're addicted so they're compromised. A variety of people,some young and active, some more on the mentally ill side of the vulnerable spectrum. Some violent. A real community.

Another anecdote: They destroyed the copper for the cooling system for a food distributor, four blocks away. A small local business that employees maybe 10 people.

I personally wish fentanyl was not so cheap. In my opinion it makes these kinds of crimes very viable. However I think if fentanyl were more expensive it would overall still be a toxic scenario, with these vulnerable people existing in modern America with its hostile anti-people pro-corporation Pro-profit faux-rugged-individualization cluster of somewhat homeostatic systemic dysfunction.

WorldPeas• 1 month ago

The worst part of the $100k damage is that it's likely for $~200 of copper or less. That said, scrapping should require identification and recording. The people who take in the scrap should be of equal blame here. Though I do agree this is likely a result of the devolution of a socialized America into something more antisocial. The copper from the mothballed-since-Reagan mental healthcare facilities is also long gone.

LorenPechtel• 1 month ago

Actually, the other way around. Cheap drugs would mean the addicts didn't have to steal as much.

Compare the harm from the hard drugs vs the harm from the winos.

ErroneousBosh3• 1 month ago

However I think if fentanyl were more expensive it would overall still be a toxic scenario

Diamorphine is cheap, cheaper than methadone. It has no real health effects, beyond the obvious suffocating-to-death-from-an-overdose. You can take clean high-grade heroin pretty much indefinitely without doing yourself any harm, if you've got a supply of it.

It's the stuff that's been stepped on with washing powder or flea powder or Shake'n'Vac that's the problem.

Here in the UK there was a doctor in Newcastle who just simply gave heroin addicts a shot of nice clean safe heroin, for free, in his surgery. Come round, get your dose, off you go to work. Every single one of them was able to hold a job, keep a family together, be a functional member of society, and with that stable background they were able to get off the smack and stay clean and sober, surprisingly quickly.

Imagine taking that pressure off opiate addicts, to go out and score, interact with criminals, steal to get money, and imagine it being actually cheaper and more effective than anything we're doing right now.

Imagine if we just did something that worked.

btreecat• 1 month ago

I'd wish they'd focus on the problems leading to folks feeling that copper theft is a better source of income than other more legitimate routes.

Speaks volumes to the local economy and support networks.

fortran772• 2 months ago

That's 100,000 watts "ERP"- the actual power in the transmission line can be as low as 5,000 watts. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_radiated_power

exabrial• 1 month ago

Sigh. Can these thieves figure out how much copper and gold is in Flock cameras?

ApolloFortyNine• 1 month ago

Total repair costs, he estimates, are somewhere between $70,000 and $100,000

This is always so depressing to read, especially when you realize the thief did the damage only to gain a couple hundred dollars in copper. It's just a massive net loss for society to deal with this.

It's a similar problem places have with people destroying ac units to steal some small amount of copper.

Theft is always bad, but this blatant net negative for the world theft is the kind of thing that makes you wonder about societies long term.

liampulles• 1 month ago

This kind of thing is totally routine here in South Africa. Probably about a third of power cuts in my area these days are due to some kind of cable or electrical theft.

nosmokewhereiam• 1 month ago

Is just setting up a mixcloud accountafter this a viable solution?...100k for the ant...

welcome_dragon• 1 month ago

Is this not an old story? I seen to recall hearing it awhile ago

kazinator• 1 month ago

Kudos to Kirtner and Adkins for retaining their counterpoise through this enraging incident.

An Ohio Valley 100k-watt FM signal is severed in broad daylight

Related Stories