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The LA Times reports that copper thieves have been stealing the wire from streetlights in areas across the city where they think they can get away with it. Scratch that, where they can get away with it.
The bikepath along the LA River was such a target that the City of LA's Department of Public Works welded the boxes at the base of the streetlights shut. Didn't work. The copper thefts continued.
At at press conference, the public works folks announced that 700 streetlights are currently out due to copperwirelessness. That's out of 242,000, which isn't all that bad, right? Except that the places they're out are fairly concentrated. Take this quote the LA Times got from a resident at hard at work in the dark at 12th and Soto in East LA:
When you don't have light in the streets you can have an accident, especially when you have people who are drinking liquor and walking in the street.
Now that's a public need. More lights for wandering drunks! Less lights for sleeping suburbanites! Come on, copper bandits, go hit Toluca Lake or something.
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Made me laugh, even though this has been a serious issue for the past couple of years. I had a friend who got a few thousand dollars worth of copper wire stolen straight from the house he was building a days after it was installed. Everything completely stripped. That was two years ago. Now, when he builds houses and they install the copper wire, he keeps it in a safe and only does it on days when he has 3 crew members with him and no subs.
I know it seems funny, but where I live downtown, all of our streelights (around all four sides of our building) are out on a regular basis. It takes forever to get the city to come out and fix them and two days later, they're out again.
Not fun when walking your dog or coming home late at night with no light. Feels pretty shady.