Posted on Sunday, September 10, 2006 - 5:44 pm:

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Copper and Robbers: Homeowners' Latest Worry
Thieves Target Wires, Pipes, Air Conditioners As Price of Hot Commodity Soars

By SARA SCHAEFER MUÑOZ and PAUL GLADER
The Wall Street Journal
September 6, 2006

While Joe Fick and his wife Rachel Vreeman were sleeping in their rental house in Indianapolis one night in July, thieves sneaked up and made off with an estimated $100 of stolen goods. But the target wasn't jewelry or electronics. It was the copper components of the house's central air conditioner.

"They unscrewed the top and pulled out the guts and left the shell there," says Mr. Fick, a campus minister.

The high price of copper is hitting home -- literally. The metal's skyrocketing scrap value is inspiring criminals to hit houses, making off with copper coils in air-conditioning units, copper wires, even the copper pipes used for plumbing, leaving some perplexed residents without running water.

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Sometimes thieves steal less than $100 worth of the metal but cause many times more in damages. Police in Detroit, for example, are reporting thousands of dollars in repair costs for street lights that have been stripped of copper components.

Driven by increased world demand for commodities, prices of steel, copper, aluminum and other metals are at historic highs. The price of copper has more than doubled in the past year, closing yesterday at $3.65 a pound on the Comex division of the New York Mercantile Exchange. The price of copper scrap -- which is processed and sold to metal-making firms -- has also doubled, with high-grade scrap now fetching around $3 or more per pound at scrapyards, and lower-grade scrap less, depending on quality, according to scrap-metal dealers.

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Thieves often target units sitting unwatched at new construction sites or empty homes, but more brazen ones will strike even when residents are home. Noreen Alexander, a 62-year-old retired social worker, was in her Detroit home one hot morning this summer when she heard a strange noise out back. About 10 minutes later, her nephew noticed that the outdoor unit of her central air conditioner was gone. "I never believed anyone would steal an air conditioner that size, period," Ms. Alexander says. "Was I mad! I was hotter than the weather."

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In response to the rash of thefts, cities are starting to crack down. Montgomery, Ala., recently passed an ordinance requiring scrapyards to report the copper they take in to the police department, and police in Detroit are making sure local scrapyards are licensed and are collecting identification information from people who sell them the metal.

Chuck Carr, a spokesman for the Institute for Scrap Recycling Industries in Washington, an association of metal-recycling companies with about 3,000 scrap-yards throughout the U.S., says his organization is bewildered by the sudden surge in theft. The organization has a scrap-theft alert system, which alerts scrap dealers by email when large lots of metal are reported stolen. ...

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Posted on Wednesday, September 20, 2006 - 11:59 am:

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MOTOR CITY NOTEBOOK: Kronk Gym takes another hit

September 20, 2006
BY BILL McGRAW
FREE PRESS COLUMNIST

Copper thieves have put the Kronk Gym out of business -- perhaps permanently.

The thieves broke into the boiler room Sunday night and stole all the copper pipes, cutting off water to the gym, which forced it to close for the foreseeable future.

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