The Theft of Cables

The cable theft is a problem that one finds in most first world countries but riff in South Africa, and apart from the huge inconvenience caused to many people in the vicinity of the crime is aware of many deaths.

The theft of electric and telephone cables are a growing and costly problem in this area of the world. These cables are stolen for the money they can generate for thieves who sell copper and other metal content to scrap dealers who in turn sell to large companies that export products to other countries, mostly in Asia.

Because copper wire cables can be melted, are actually a traceable and can be reused, it becomes very tradable goods prices reached based on world copper prices.

This practice over the last twenty years has cost the authority of power generation and your company millions of dollars in losses. They even spent millions trying to mark their cables (similar to the marking of livestock) to encourage retailers not to buy cables marked scratch, but this has done nothing to curb the trade.

Despite this side of the cable theft problem can be measured in dollar terms of friction and is transmitted to consumers is the darker side to this problem is even greater.

Take the recent theft of underground electrical cables in Johannesburg, where thieves smashed and stole electrical wires below the street level. The amount of damage caused in making the cable length that caused two substations in the city to go down. This in turn an entire neighborhood plunged into darkness for several days and forced one of the largest malls in the southern hemisphere to close for five days. Imagine the financial loses this case.

Originally, this problem was caused by small groups of vandals and an employed people who just do to generate some money for themselves. Usually your local group of vagrants and homeless people who do this to generate cash for their daily meals with wine and cigarettes. However, now that the criminal elements larger and more organized, have entered the market, things have taken a turn nasty, which is the death of innocent people in homes and hospitals that depend on having an uninterrupted supply of electricity to sustain life. Also lives have been lost because of inability to use the phone in an emergency.

Cable theft has grown further with the advent of electricity which was the poorest of the poor areas. Here is that cables are being stolen, but the content – the electricity itself.

The poor are resorting to connect their devices directly to overhead power lines and therefore the theft of electricity. It is estimated that one person dies every day trying this type of theft and during cold spells are lost innocents. In the recent cold snap in southern Africa defective devices connected illegally to the overhead wires, killing four children.

As seen in this short report is much more than cable theft that meets the eye!