93 degrees at work: Pasadena businesses swelter after copper wire thefts wreck AC units
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Set us as preferred These days, the temperature inside the kitchen at Sweet Red Peach bakery is at least 93 degrees.Danny Griffin, the franchise co-owner of the location, and his employees swelter in the back of the Pasadena shop as they race to ice cakes, cinnamon rolls and other baked goods before the frosting all melts away.
The brutal heat and intense working conditions inside the kitchen and the front area of the business come after a thief wrecked the rooftop air conditioning unit in search of copper wiring.Griffin says he’s had no choice but to stay open during this time, despite the heat risks to himself and employees as the hottest temperatures of the year so far bake Southern California.
“We got to be here in order to stay open.If not, we’d close,” Griffin said in an interview with The Times on Tuesday.
The loss of the AC is “impacting us greatly,” he added.Griffin and the bakery workers first realized something was wrong when it got abnormally hot in their kitchen last Tuesday.
“We wouldn’t want to subject ourselves to anything like this.It’s not safe,” he said.
“It’s like working outside.” Since the beginning of the year, there have been a total of six rooftop air conditioning units at Pasadena businesses robbed of their copper-wire components, Pasadena Police Lt.Monica Cuellar told The Times.
Two of them occurred in the last several days.It’s a change of tactics for thieves in the city, according to Pasadena spokesperson Lisa Derdarian; before the string of rooftop thefts, incidents of copper wire being taken by thieves were almost entirely limited to what was accessible at street level.
The rooftop thefts are a newer trend in the Pasadena area and have amounted to more damage than what the copper material is worth, Cuellar said.Yet the city has warned businesses with rooftop A...