A Metal Worth Stealing
Copper has carried power through America’s electrical grid for more than a century, and right now it is worth stealing. Prices at all-time highs have pushed thieves onto car roofs to saw down phone lines and into street manholes, jimmied open in daylight, in search of wiring. A Los Angeles detective who works undercover described the fallout to CNN: darkened roads and bridges, 911 calls that never connect, and rising utility bills as repair costs flow through to ratepayers.
The economics are simple. US copper prices climbed more than 30 percent this year on a surge of data center building and tariff speculation under the Trump administration, per JPMorgan. The detective, with the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, said price is the engine behind it all. “This doesn’t happen just once a week or once a month,” he said of the thefts. “These things happen daily.”
The Numbers Behind the Outages
The scale is national. NCTA, the trade group for TV and internet providers, counted over 15,000 destructive attacks on US communication networks in the twelve months to June 2025, copper theft among the biggest causes. Some 9.5 million customers lost service, and more than half of all incidents came from just two states, California and Texas.
Los Angeles is a hot spot. The city, still rebuilding from the worst wildfires it has seen in a generation while preparing to host the World Cup and the 2028 Olympics, spends millions each year on repairs alongside its utilities. Its Sixth Street Bridge, a 3,500-foot landmark unveiled in 2022 that lit up in shifting LED colors, now sits dark. Thieves have stripped more than 38,000 feet of copper wiring from the span, enough for seven miles, with the damage put at $2.5 million by Mark González, the area’s state assemblymember. “We have multiple incidents just in our areas each day. It adds up,” the detective said, noting that construction sites rebuilding after the January Palisades and Eaton wildfires, which destroyed over 16,000 homes and other structures, draw thieves constantly.
Stolen bare copper is hard to trace, he added. “For now, it’s kind of the Wild West,” the detective added. A spokesperson for Mayor Karen Bass called the thefts a threat to public safety rather than a mere nuisance, and said the city is also pushing streetlights powered by solar panels, which need no copper wiring at all. Theft-related streetlight outages had already increased tenfold between 2017 and 2022, per the city’s Bureau of Street Lighting.
AT&T Loses the Manhole War
Near Exposition Park, burglars popped a manhole lid in January, tunneled into a facility run by AT&T that serves thousands of area residents, and pulled out hundreds of pounds of wire. The company bolted a 2,000-pound steel plate over the opening; the thieves got back in. By July, AT&T sealed the hole with concrete. “A lot of times they (thieves) don’t know what is copper versus fiber,” said Jeff Luong, a vice president of engineering. “So they’re just cutting cables,” he said.
The company reported 2,200 copper theft incidents across California in 2024, against just 71 in 2021, and now offers rewards of up to $20,000. The copper theft bill, per California state president Susan Santana, ran past $60 million last year. “Remember, it’s not just the $60 million impact to our bottom line,” she said. “Think about the 911 calls that are not being made or the hospitals that can’t use their equipment because the internet is down.”
In October, Governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill raising penalties and cracking down on recyclers who buy stolen copper, joining 12 other states that passed similar laws in 2025.
Sources
- The Red Metal Rush: How Record Copper Prices Are Dismantling America’s Critical Infrastructure
- Copper prices are rising. Thieves are taking notice | CNN Business
