High Scrap prices brings out vultures too.
In California last summer a friends neighbor had their Cat. converter stolen from their van while in their driveway while they were sleeping at night.
Locally after Katrina one would be gutting ones house, ie removing the first 4 feet of sheetrock, insulation and ones "stuff" and hauling it to the curb. While in the house cutting out and ripping out old carpet, one guy entered my house in an attempt to cut out the copper pipes. Thus one drove these rats off with a shotgun, no shots just making a stance that one will not tolerate further loses. A 2nd time a bozo with cutters and a trailer full of AC units tried to remove my 5 ton AC unit, like it is their offical duty to remove them.
Post Katrina ,Folks who could not secure their ruined houses often gutted the sheetrock, removed carpet and TV's etc, then the copper vultures would cut out the pipes in the walls. This with some houses pushed the offical losses above 50 percent, such that the building got condemed, or one had to get gobs of permits to rebuild. These vultures had the gall/balls to actually shut off the water and then actual sort of like officals. They even would cut off the 4 foot piece of copper #6 ground wire to ones power box too.
After Katrina during the building boom, contractors had copper stolen in houses being built, thus they would have security 24/7 until the house was sealed.
One set of thugs used a well known contractors work shirts with LOGOS and went to high end rebuilt houses with copper flashing and gutters and acted like they were just doing finish work, and removed the copper.
***One thing the the law did few years back was make it so there was a 3 day waiting period for getting paid for scrap metals and one had to have an ID and SS number. This dropped stealing so much that the scrap folks had to lay off a mess of folks.
With plumbing many new houses here are built with PEX due to coppers costs and issues with stealing copper while a house is being built. The same goes with copper wire, a place under construction or a building being rebuilt gets stripped of its copper wires.
One had a High unemployement rate post Katrina because one had to have a family member stay at ones unsealed house, to ward off the scrap metal vultures. These "vulture STORMERS" are one component of STORMERS that work disasters, ie removal of crud with giant trucks, quickie roof repairs, instant contractors.
There are folks who made 5 to 50k a week in removing stuff one hauled to the curb. They got paid by the cubic yard of crud, each truck had the Yardage marked on thee side. They would circle the neighborhood and fill the truck with easy stuff like sofas, then top it off with stuff that was heavy. An inspector at the crap yard would look at the top and give them a weighting factor; higher if it looked like heavy stuff. Thus the stormers would only remove the heavy small items once they were about full to get a better rating for that load.
