Stay up to date with our Up First newsletter sent every weekday morning.HAYWARD, Calif.– In an industrial yard off a highway east of San Francisco, AT&T workers crowd around cold, hard evidence of a growing problem."Sitting here [is] a truck full of what is stolen copper cable," says Todd Swensen, from AT&T's construction and engineering division.
The jumble of cables and wires, about the size of a truck tire, was recovered from a metal recycler.Swensen says that cable actually belongs to AT&T, and was cut down from telephone poles by thieves.Over the past few years, there has been an alarming rise in copper wire theft in the United States and beyond.
The value of copper has roughly doubled in the past year, thanks in part to increasing demand for the metal.So thieves strip it from phone lines, as well as from other infrastructure like streetlamps and EV chargers.
Repairs cost companies and communities, vex corporate executives and politicians and tax work crews.Swensen says record-high prices of copper — buoyed, in part, by the artificial intelligence data center boom — are to blame."The higher the price of copper is at a recycler and on the market, our theft goes up.
Direct correlation there," he says.This pile of wires might fetch a few hundred dollars at a recycler.But Swensen says the damage could cost the company tens of thousands of dollars to repair.AT&T executives have grown frustrated with the problem, which is why they've invited NPR on a ride-along to see it firsthand.
So we caravan to a railroad crossing, where at 3:40 in the morning, an alarm had gone off alerting the company that cables had been cut down from nearby telephone poles.The company suspected the work of thieves."What they typically do is they cut the cable down, they'll pull it to a location and they start working on stripping it," says Scott Gonzaga, also with AT&T."Then they burn it to get the sheath off and to get it down to the bare copper." That metal i...