Sometimes it seems we’re watching a Mad Max episode where marauding gangs scour what’s left of a dystopian society in search of precious metals. Except we’re just reading stories in The Commercial about copper thieves.
Now it’s Hestand Stadium that’s been hit.
Dale Dixon, who is connected to the Hestand operation, said about $12,000 in copper and other material had been stolen. That probably doesn’t count the damage caused by the thieves.
The total keeps rising on copper thefts. The numbers have been mostly reported by AT&T because they are the ones that service many customers – whose service is interrupted when copper cable disappears. But it’s not a stretch to think that, with as many abandoned houses as there are in town, a lot of those properties have been stripped of anything of value as well.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
Just a month ago, AT&T and the Pine Bluff Police Department, which has had some luck arresting suspected culprits, reported that almost $400,000 in copper had been stolen in Pine Bluff.
At Hestand Stadium the problem has been like swatting flies. As Dixon tells it, thieves hit the facility several months ago and “stole everything, even the conduit the copper goes in.”
“So this time they got our newer barn that the city gave us money about eight or nine years ago to build,” he said. “…Well they went in there and stole everything, including the conduit out of the building. Then, they went in and worked on the northside of the arena and killed all the electricity out there.”
Not only is this a financial aggravation for Hestand Stadium, it’s untimely as well, with several events scheduled in the near future for the stadium. Dixon is understandably upset.
“I believe if you’re not an electrician or some type of electrical technician, you shouldn’t be having no copper,” he said. “I look at it that way, and it’s very upsetting that you work out there year-round to get events here and two weeks before it starts, they hit us.”
Pine Bluff is hardly alone in this struggle. A July 9 headline in The New York Times said: “Metal Thieves Are Stripping America’s Cities.” There was a nighttime photo of a bridge and a story that said the bridge, known as the “Ribbon of Light” that had been lit up to celebrate Los Angeles’ spirit, now stayed dark at night because the wires had all been stripped away.
And in Las Vegas, the story went on to say, close to 200 miles had been stolen from street lights in the city and surrounding areas in the past two years.
As Dixon said, the finger eventually points at the people who buy the material. Copper prices hit an all-time high recently, so there’s bound to be an underground black market element to where stolen copper goes. But somehow that material has to re-emerge, and it would seem that it is in those more public places where law enforcement could gain the upper hand. And by law enforcement, we mean state and federal agencies. This is too big for one town in southeast Arkansas to address, and the problem itself is way bigger than that anyway.