Subscribe to this blog's feedNow here’s another sign of the times. Copper piping and wiring found in many of America’s repossessed homes are now more valuable than the properties themselves.
Thieves are apparently stripping empty houses of copper, aluminium and any brass in their plumbing and heating systems to take advantage of the soaring price of scrap metal, much of which is being sold to China and India.
“Houses are getting stripped pretty quickly once they go through the foreclosure process,” according to Tony Brancatelli, a city councillor in Cleveland, Ohio, which has been particularly hard hit by the collapse in the US housing market.
Things have got so bad that boarded-up properties now have “no copper, only pvc” painted outside in a bid to deter thieves. One result is that US states have drafted laws to address the problem, in some cases tightening the rules on scrap traders or imposing harsher penalties for metal theft.
Over here, a recent BBC regional television programme included an interview with one rather lucky Cambridgeshire thief called Philip Galloway. On camera he explained how he received a 33,000V shock when he tried to steal the wiring from an electricity sub-station in Great Gidding.
He told BBC’s Inside Out, East that after difficulties signing up for Jobseekers’ Allowance, he decided to earn some cash by stealing. He got into the sub-station to get his hands on some copper. “My hands touched one of the boxes. I thought it was dead, but it blew me clean back and I was lying on the floor with my eyes at the back of my head,” he said.
He was able to call for help but the emergency services couldn’t enter the sub-station until it was made safe. So for 45 minutes Mr Galloway was lying on the ground, alone, waiting for the paramedics to reach him.
His arm turned into “a big blistered balloon”. Subsequently he has had skin grafts, operations on the arm and is in constant pain.
