Maine news, sports, weather from Portland Press Herald / Maine Sunday Telegram, Portland, Maine

August 30, 2012

Plagued by a metal theft epidemic

Rogue scrap yards willing to pay high prices for copper and steel add to the problem in California.

Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES - Earlier this summer, thieves in Pico Rivera, Calif., made off with a 200-pound brass bell from a Catholic church. Burglars around California have torn up train tracks, carted off bleachers, nabbed park statues and helped themselves to copper wiring serving neighborhoods, hospitals and airports.

The state is in the throes of a metal theft epidemic, fueled by scrap yards' willingness to pay high prices for copper and steel that can be resold to hungry factories in Asia.

In Southern California, a proliferation of unpermitted scrap yards -- which have set up shop here to take advantage of access to the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach -- has exacerbated the problem.

Regulators acknowledge that, at times, they have been unable to keep up with the number of illegal operations and the environmental threat they pose. And in their eagerness to cash in on an export trade worth $7 billion annually, even some permitted scrap yards are ignoring laws designed to stem metal theft.

The task of ferreting out metal theft in Los Angeles County is left mainly to two men: Kevin Romine, a detective with the Los Angeles Police Department, and Detective Dave Chapman, a Los Angeles County sheriff's deputy.

According to Romine, at least half the metal, excluding iron, in city scrap yards probably is stolen. In the year he's been on the job, he has shut down a dozen unpermitted yards in the city of Los Angeles alone.

"I learned a long time ago, it's more than I can handle," Chapman said.

On a recent morning, he and a civilian investigator drove through the Alameda Corridor -- a 20-mile freight rail route linking the ports to downtown Los Angeles -- in search of scofflaw scrap operations. They passed one metal recycling business after another until Chapman pulled into one that didn't appear to have a sign.

"This is a pop-up," he said. "This wasn't here a couple of months ago."

Workers were loading hunks of car engines and transmission housings into a shipping container plunked down in the middle of a yard. There was no office, just a badly ventilated trailer surrounded by piles of metal. In a far corner of the yard, a worker was stripping copper wire.

"What do you call this place?" Chapman asked a man who came out of the trailer. The worker, who did not give his name, said one side of the yard was known as "S" metals; the other side had a different name.

Chapman could see no obvious signs that any of the metal there was stolen. But other times, he said, the evidence has been glaring.

He and his partner recently saw a man trying to sell bread racks right out of a bakery truck. While they were interviewing that suspect, Chapman said, another man showed up at the yard looking to sell municipal storm grates, but disappeared before officers could ask questions.

In 2007, the U.S. Department of Energy estimated that metal theft was costing businesses $1 billion a year nationwide. Copper theft, in particular, "disrupts the flow of electricity, telecommunications, transportation, water supply, heating, and security and emergency services, and presents a risk to both public safety and national security," a 2008 FBI report said.

Four years ago, California was among the first states to pass laws requiring that sellers provide photo identifications to scrap yards and wait at least three days for payment for many metals. On the purchasing side, the yards were obligated to maintain records and make an honest effort to determine whether the sellers actually owned the material they were peddling.

(Continued on page 2)

Tweet