SAN FRANCISCO (Dow Jones) -- The thieves come in the night, armed with little except pliers, cutters and a means to haul off their targeted electrical wires, water meters and even funeral vases.

They're all after one thing: the copper used extensively in building construction and electrical transmission because of its conductivity and high melting point.

Sold for scrap and melted down, the stolen parts are hard to trace. But the real attraction for these sometimes-fatal thefts, according to police and businesses, is the soaring value of copper.

It's now worth about $3 a pound, up from $1 a pound a few years ago.

"The driving factor is the price of scrap metals," said Len Singer, a spokesman for Detroit Edison, one of the Midwest's biggest electric utilities. " As that price has gone up, incrementally we've seen more incidents."

The DTE Energy (DTE) unit on Nov. 1 posted a $1,000 award for information leading to the arrest of anyone who steals copper wire from the utility.

That day, a crew from the utility found a man lying dead next to a pole in Detroit, apparently having been electrocuted while attempting to cut live power wires, said a spokesman for the Detroit Police Department.

In the past month, the utility has dealt with about 100 copper thefts, mostly of wiring, Singer said, and they've cropped up in rural areas along Lake Huron as well as in the cities.

The risk for thieves is sizeable: Some of the utility's lines carry up to 13, 000 volts, which can easily kill a person on contact, Singer said.

'Crime du jour'

Reports of copper thefts are rampant. Police departments from Seattle to Tempe, Ariz., to Council Bluffs, Iowa, say they've witnessed a rash of thefts this year.

"This is the crime du jour, the metals thefts," said Sgt. John Urquhart, a spokesman for the King County, Wash., sheriff's department. "For the last six months, we've really seen a resurgence."

Last month, two cemeteries in the Seattle area reported thefts of up to 250 vases cast from brass and bronze -- both metal alloys that include copper -- that bereaved families had placed on gravestones, according to Urquhart. The sheriff's department arrested two men who were trying to sell such vases at local scrap yards, recovering about 125, he said.

The five-pound vases cost about $150 each when new. But they probably fetch just $5 or $6 at a scrap yard, Urquhart said.

Prices, availability fuel spree

Still, easy access to the items have lured thieves to trade these and other copper-based objects for prices that have more than tripled in the past four years.

Demand spurred by the industrial buildout taking place in China and other parts of Asia has fueled much of this rise, which has accelerated in the last year.

"It's China that drives the scrap market," said Andrew Cole, an analyst with Metal Bulletin Research. "They import a lot from the U.S. and anywhere else they can find it."

For the primary metal, the price of copper futures has surged more than 82% in the last year, to $3.37 a pound. In 2002 the price of copper had fallen below 70 cents a share.

Scrap prices, in turn, rose to record highs in April and May, said Brian Halloran, a vice president in nonferrous marketing at Commercial Metals Co. ( CMC) , one of the country's biggest metals recyclers.

Benchmark prices for copper scrap, which is priced at a discount to the primary metal because it's not pure, are now about $3 a pound, according to Halloran.

That's about the top end of what Alco Iron & Metal, a scrap-metals recycler in San Leandro, Calif., pays people who walk through its door carrying copper in wires or other scrap forms.

Five years ago, this copper fetched about $1 a pound, said a buyer at the San Francisco Bay Area-based recycler.

So it's no wonder that thieves have sought out copper wherever it's found in bulk, from construction sites to power stations.

On Oct. 18, police in Orinda, Calif., received a complaint from PG&E Corp. ( PCG) that more than $7,000 in copper wire, fittings, bolts and other materials had been stolen from one of the electric utility's substations.

In Tempe, Ariz., police received so many calls about copper thefts, mainly of copper wire and pipes from construction sites, that in July it created a special code for the crime, said Tempe Police Department spokesman Brandon Banks.

Theives have even broken into water meters to extract their copper wires, he said.

And in Council Bluffs, Iowa, police last month arrested two men accused of stealing more than 300 pounds of copper from a 104-year-old cupola that once adorned the Iowa School for the Deaf, the Omaha World-Herald reported.

The thefts often take place in areas where the economy is struggling or where drug addicts are looking for quick cash.

"We think the motive for this is to get money, often to buy methamphetamine," said King County's Urquardt.

  (END) Dow Jones Newswires
  11-09-06 1423ET
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