American cities are in the dark as thieves are stripping down street lights and other outdoor fixtures for their metal to sell for cash.
In Las Vegas and its surrounding communities, more than 970,000 feet of electrical wiring, the equivalent of 184 miles, have gone missing from street lights over the past two years, The Times reported.
Meanwhile, the 6th Street Bridge in Los Angeles, which is wired to glow with colorful lights and is also known as the “Ribbon of Light,” now remains dark at night, along with stretches of the 405 freeway and dozens of street blocks across the city.
Thieves have stripped the copper wire from thousands of street lights across the country, selling it to scrap metal recyclers for cash. The wiring usually sells for a few hundred dollars, but street blackouts pose significant safety hazards to drivers and pedestrians, along with costing cities millions to repair.
In late April, six people were charged in connection with an effort to steal thousands of pounds of copper wire across St. Paul, Minnesota. One member of this wire “cutting crew” had collected $12,169 from recyclers between November 2023 and January, according to a police report. In the same city, a man and his dog were struck by a car and killed crossing a street near his home where the street lights were out.
This past winter, two men in Denver were arrested for removing bronze artwork from a Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. monument, causing around $85,000 in damage.
At the Lincoln Memorial Park Cemetery in Carson, California, dozens of nameplates were stolen off mausoleums, including a commemorative plaque dedicated to the boxer Joe Louis, and even the metal pipe that waters the lawn, Aisha Woods, who volunteers to maintain the cemetery, reported.
The spike in thefts comes amid a strong demand for metals, copper especially, in the economy, and can be traced back to the pandemic, as many recycling facilities shut down, disrupting the supply of scrap metal. At around the same time, the Biden administration began spending billions to fund considerable infrastructure projects.
Karthik Valluru, leader of Boston Consulting Group’s materials and process industries sector, told The Times there will be an estimated global shortage of as much as 10 million tons of copper over the next two years, making its scraps even more valuable.
