A panel electromechanical switch similar to those in use in New York until the 1970s. They were installed in the 1920s.

As late as the 1970s, New York Telephone (today Verizon) was still maintaining electromechanical panel switches in its telephone exchanges that were developed in the middle of World War I and installed in Manhattan between 1922-1930. Reliance on infrastructure 40-50 years old is nothing new for telephone companies across North America. A Verizon technician in New York City is just as likely to descend into tunnels constructed well before they were born as is a Bell technician in Toronto.

Slightly marring last week’s ambitious announcement Bell (Canada) was going to commence an upgrade to fiber to the home service across the Greater Toronto Area came word from a frank Bell technician in attendance who predicted Bell’s plans were likely to run into problems as workers deal with aging copper infrastructure originally installed by their fathers and grandfathers decades earlier.

The technician said some of the underground conduits he was working in just weeks earlier in Toronto’s downtown core were “easily 60-70 years old” and the existing optical fiber cables running through some of them were installed in the mid-1980s.

At least that conduit contained fiber. In many other cities, copper infrastructure from the 1960s-1980s is still in service, performing unevenly in some cases and not much at all in others.

Earlier this year, several hundred Verizon customers were without telephone service for weeks because of water intrusion into copper telephone cables, possibly amplified by the corrosive road salt dumped on New York streets to combat a severe winter. Verizon’s copper was down and out while its fiber optic network was unaffected. On the west coast, AT&T deals with similar outages caused by flooding. If that doesn’t affect service, copper theft might.

Fiber optic cable

Telephone companies fight to get their money’s worth from infrastructure, no matter how old it is. Western Electric first envisioned the panel switches used in New York City telephone exchanges until the end of the Carter Administration back in 1916. It was all a part of AT&T’s revolutionary plan to move to subscriber-dialed calls, ending an era of asking an operator to connect you to another customer.

AT&T engineer W.G. Blauvelt wrote the plan that moved New York to fully automatic dialing. By 1930, every telephone exchange in Manhattan was served by a panel switch that allowed customers to dial numbers by themselves. But Blauvelt could not have envisioned that equipment would still be in use fifty years later.

As demand for telephones grew, the phone company did not expand its network of panel switches, which were huge – occupying entire buildings – loud, and very costly to maintain. It did not replace them either. Instead, newer exchanges got the latest equipment, starting with more modern Crossbar #1 switches in 1938. In the 1950s, Crossbar #5 arrived and it became a hit worldwide. Crossbar #5 switches usually stood alone or worked alongside older switching equipment in fast growing exchanges. It occupied less space, worked well without obsessive maintenance, and was reliable.

It was not until the 1970s that the Bell System decided to completely scrap their electromechanical switches in favor of newer electronic technology. The advantages were obvious — the newer equipment occupied a fraction of the space and had considerably more capacity than older switches. That became critical in New York starting in the late 1960s when customer demand for additional phone lines exploded. New York Telephone simply could not keep up with and waiting lists often grew to weeks as technicians looked for spare capacity. The Bell System’s answer to this growth was a new generation of electronic switches.

The #1 ESS was an analog electronic switch first introduced in New Jersey in 1965. Although it worked fine in smaller and medium-sized communities, the switch’s software bugs were notorious when traffic on the exchange reached peak loads. It was clear to New York Telephone the #1 ESS was not ready for Manhattan until the bugs were squashed.

Bell companies, along with some independent phone companies that depended on the same equipment, moved cautiously to begin upgrades. It would take North American phone companies until August 2001 to retire what was reportedly the last electromechanical switch, serving the small community of Nantes, Quebec.

A notorious 1975 fire destroyed a phone exchange serving lower Manhattan. That was one way to guarantee an upgrade from New York Telephone.

On rare occasions, phone companies didn’t have much of a choice. The most notorious example of this was the Feb. 27, 1975 fire in the telephone exchange located at 204 Second Avenue and East 13th Street in New York. The five alarm fire destroyed the switching equipment and knocked out telephone service for 173,000 customers before 700 firefighters from 72 fire units managed to put the fire out more than 16 hours later. That fire is still memorialized today by New York firefighters because it injured nearly 300 of them. But the fire’s legacy continued for decades as long-term health effects, including cancer, from the toxic smoke would haunt those who fought it.

The New York Telephone building still stands and today also houses a street level Verizon Wireless retail store.

New York Telephone engineers initially rescued a decommissioned #1 Crossbar switch waiting to be melted down for scrap. It came from the West 18th Street office and was cleaned and repaired and put into emergency service until a #1 ESS switch originally destined for another central office was diverted. This part of Manhattan got its upgrade earlier for all the wrong reasons.

Throughout the Bell System in the 1970s and 80s, older switches were gradually replaced in favor of all electronic switches, especially the #5 ESS, introduced in 1982 and still widely in service today, serving about 50% of all landlines in the United States. Canadian telephone companies often favored telephone switches manufactured by Northern Telecom (Nortel), based in Mississauga, Ontario. They generally worked equally well as the American counterpart and are also in service in parts of the United States.

The legacy of more than 100 years of telephone service has made running old and new technology side by side nothing unusual for telephone companies. It has worked for them before, as has their belief in incremental upgrades. So Bell’s announcement it would completely blanket Toronto with all-fiber service is a departure from standard practice.

For Bell in Toronto, the gigabit upgrade will begin by pushing fiber cables through existing conduits that are also home to copper and fiber wiring still in service. If a conduit is blocked or lacks enough room to get new fiber cables through, the Bell technician predicted delays. It is very likely that sometime after fiber service is up and running, copper wire decommissioning will begin in Toronto. Whether those cables remain dormant underground and on phone poles for cost reasons or torn out and sold for scrap will largely depend on scrap copper prices, Bell’s budget, and possible regulator intervention.

But Bell’s upgrade will clearly be as important, if not more so, than the retirement of mechanical phone switches a few decades earlier. For the same reasons — decreased maintenance costs, increased capacity, better reliability, and the possibility to market new services for revenue generation make fiber just as good of an investment for Bell as electronic switches were in the 1970s and 1980s.

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/ATT Reconnecting 170000 Phone Customers in NYC After a Major Fire 1975.mp4[/flv]

AT&T produced this documentary in the mid-1970s about how New York Telephone recovered from a fire that destroyed a phone exchange in lower Manhattan and wiped out service for 173,000 customers in 1975. The phone company managed to get service restored after an unprecedented three weeks. It gives viewers a look at the enormous size of old electromechanical switching equipment and masses of phone wiring. (22:40) 

Despite dozens of new state laws and an effort by lawmakers to make metal theft a federal crime carrying a 10-year prison sentence, the epidemic of copper cable theft is expected to get worse before it gets better. The reason? China’s insatiable demand for North America’s enormous supply of discarded and stolen wire.

“The FBI has indicated that there’s so much theft taking place that it’s causing a national infrastructure issue,” said Lt. Terry Alling, a law enforcement official who now consults with police departments on how to recognize and curtail valuable metal thefts.

Scrap copper used to end up in the trash, especially telephone and coaxial cable used by phone and cable companies. With bare, high quality copper wiring valued at only $0.50 a pound for years, many scrap dealers were uninterested in shielded telecom cables that were a costly nuisance to process for recycling.

That changed in late 2003 when copper prices began a dramatic rise, first doubling to $1 a pound by 2004 and then suddenly spiking to an eye-popping $4 by 2006. Only the arrival of the Great Recession in 2008 would temporarily stem demand, dropping prices below $1.50 a pound. Two years later, prices dramatically rebounded, reaching an all time high of $4.50 a pound, and have remained above $3 ever since.

[flv width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/KOMO Seattle Copper Theft Epidemic 5-6-13.mp4[/flv]

KOMO in Seattle went undercover to sell scrap copper and quickly discovered why copper wire theft is now an epidemic — scrap dealers are ignoring the law and buying suspect copper with no questions asked. (5 minutes)

As prices have increased, so have copper thefts. Starting about a decade ago, law enforcement personnel discovered they were responding to a growing wave of reports of stolen manhole covers, copper pipe taken from abandoned buildings or construction sites, copper air conditioner coils gone missing, and even statues and other art work ripped out of the ground.

Outside of the risk of falling into a manhole missing its cover, the biggest threat to public safety has come from utility infrastructure theft. Brazen thieves have shown their interest in turning scrap metal into cash has taken a priority over their personal safety and yours. Amazed utility workers were shocked to find thieves even willing to steal infrastructure from live power substations, often leaving customers in the dark as a result. A less risky, but just as profitable strategy has come from harvesting telephone cable right off of telephone poles, knocking out service for hundreds or thousands of customers as a result.

Some of the worst problems for telecom companies are in rural areas and smaller cities where thieves can remove cable with a good chance of not being seen.

In the Pacific Northwest, Spokane experienced cable theft from area substations. In Olympia, $30,000 of electric cable was stripped from street lights.

Three soccer fields in Federal Way experienced repeated copper theft, resulting in $150,000 in damages, despite efforts by the Federal Way Soccer Association to discourage thieves.

“We’ve changed the locks in all the systems, we’ve gone to gluing down doors on the boxes — nothing is stopping them,” said George Fifer.

Frontier Communications customers in Washington have been among the hardest hit. Last year, Frontier reported 10 major outages as a result of copper wire theft in the state. Frontier’s problems are nearly as bad in Ohio and West Virginia, those states being hit the most often. This year is more of the same in Washington, with at least 2,000 Frontier customers knocked out of service since April.

Frontier Communications has reported lines being stolen in Snohomish, Skykomish and Granite Falls, causing temporary outages for customers throughout north King and Snohomish counties.

[flv width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/KCPQ Seattle Thieves ripping out bulk phone lines 7-25-13.flv[/flv]

In July, KCPQ in Seattle reported copper thieves struck again, wiping out phone service in parts of Snohomish County, Wash. Nearly 2,000 Seattle-area customers have been hit so far. (3 minutes)

“Customers are taken out of service, they’re put at risk, they can’t call 911,” said Frontier Communications general Manager Ken Baldwin. “The emergency folks can’t run the trace and know where they need to be.”

Alling estimates at least 90 percent of the copper theft is committed by meth addicts, motivated by their habit and unafraid to take risks.

They rely on selling their stolen copper to a network of scrap dealers that pay consumers and construction firms for “recovered/unwanted metals.” Although many scrap dealers operate legitimate businesses and don’t want to deal in stolen copper, there are more than a few willing to look the other way. Those dealers typically pay quick cash at below market prices to people who cannot credibly explain where the weekly bales of phone cable are coming from, so they don’t ask.

There is usually little risk to the dealers, who are unlikely to leave stolen copper in the storage yard for very long.

Alling says the copper crime wave is being fed by insatiable demand from the booming economy of China.

“They’re buying all the copper that they can get their hands on,” Alling said. “It’s speculated that they’re stockpiling and there’s not going to be any slowdown whatsoever for an extended period. The price is going to stay up which means that theft is going to stay up as well.”

A forthcoming book excerpted by Bloomberg Business Week seems to confirm Alling’s experience.

“Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade,” published in November by Bloomsbury Publishing, digs deep into the world of scrap metal and the Asian metal market that increasingly drives most of the demand.

[flv width=”576″ height=”344″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/KCPQ Seattle Copper wire theft becoming an epidemic 1-2013.flv[/flv]

Washington’s Most Wanted reports wire theft is becoming an epidemic in the Pacific Northwest, costing taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars and risking public safety. Now local law enforcement is learning how to fight back. (3 minutes)

China alone accounted for 43.1 percent of all global copper demand in 2012, writes Adam Minter, more than five times the amount of copper acquired by the U.S. that same year. For at least a decade, China has imported 70 percent of the scrap copper it uses to power its enormous manufacturing and construction industries. China’s most attractive source for recycled copper? The United States.

Minter writes at least 100 roving Chinese scrap dealers are traveling across the country in rental cars from scrap yard to scrap yard. They come ready to buy… a lot. Some scrap dealers receive visitors from China almost daily. Minter notes many of those 100 will spend an average of $1 million a week on discarded (or stolen) copper, much of it considered “low-grade” by American dealers because it requires cumbersome and expensive processing before it can be melted down or reused in new ways.

That is no problem for scrap dealers like Johnson Zeng, employed by a scrap importer in China’s Guangdong Province.

As Zeng browses one scrap yard in St. Louis, his interest piques when he sees bales and boxes of power lines and what the scrap trade calls “jelly.”

This is where Frontier Communications and other phone companies come in.

Much of the stolen telephone cable sold for scrap contains hundreds, if not thousands of individual copper wires, each wrapped in insulation and in turn wrapped around a thick black sheath to keep the weather out. This is the cable one might find serving entire neighborhoods or business blocks with landline phone service and DSL. If you cut into that cable, often 2″ in diameter, there is a chance it would begin oozing a Vaseline-like gel — the “jelly” Zeng has an interest in. That goo is primarily designed to keep underground phone cables dry because it helps repel corrosion-causing moisture.

A minimum order for a Chinese exporter typically needs to fill at least one shipping container of this size.

Minter notes American recyclers hate jelly cable because it clogs their processing equipment. In China, it is in high demand because it is cheaply obtained and can be processed by an army of workers that cut the cable apart and wash away the petroleum product by hand.

Without the demand for “low-grade” copper wiring such as telephone cables coming from abroad, thieves would be unlikely to find any interest for their ill-gotten gains.

Cable companies have it easier. Asian exporters have shown little interest in coaxial cable because the effort to free the copper center conductor from the thick plastic sheath and wire netting that surrounds it is, for now, not worth it.

The demand on scrap dealers to maintain sufficient inventory to keep the roving band of exporters coming back is intense. Most Chinese buyers need a minimum order of one shipping container holding at least 40,000 pounds to make the deal worthwhile. Those containers are the size of a load driven by an 18-wheeler tractor-trailer.

At just one scrap yard, Zeng offered to buy all 10,000 pounds of “jelly” phone cable — all the dealer had in stock that day —  5,000 pounds of “grease wire,” and a large quantity of discarded Christmas tree light strings — another popular target for Asian exporters looking for cheap low-grade wire.

Within hours, Zeng would be back inside his rental car traveling to the next scrap dealer in a journey that took him from Illinois to South Carolina.

The recycling industry points out that if the Chinese were not in the market for American wire, it would end up in a landfill because copper demand within the United States is too low to justify the processing and labor costs to recycle it.

But that demand also fuels the growing copper theft plaguing the United States, and that costs every American taxpayer.

“The Department of Energy estimates that for every $100 that a copper thief actually gets in stolen materials, it costs $5,000 in repairs,” Alling said.

[flv width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/KXLY Spokane Copper Theft Law 7-2013.flv[/flv]

KXLY in Spokane reports miles of live power cables have been stolen by copper thieves. It takes a small amount of copper wire to make a lot of money, encouraging thieves to take more risks for bigger payoffs. Now a new Washington state law includes a “no-buy” list that keeps repeat offenders from selling to dealers in adjacent counties.  (3 minutes)

Alling blames the meth addicts who commit the crimes, but also fingers scrap metal dealers who buy without asking questions. The source of stolen copper varies in different parts of the country. While telecommunications lines are most affected in rural communities, copper pipes and air conditioning coils are favorite targets in urban areas.

Most states have enacted new laws to curb the trade in stolen copper. Many require dealers to demand ID from sellers and keep detailed purchase records allowing law enforcement to identify the source of stolen cable found at scrap yards. Others require a license to sell copper to recyclers, a limit on the amount of scrap that can be sold to a dealer, and provisions for stiff fines and jail time for those caught buying or selling stolen metal.

In some states like West Virginia, tougher copper theft laws are beginning to curb thieves, but in South Carolina the thefts continue, despite the fact the state requires sellers of copper to first obtain a permit from a local sheriff’s office before selling their metal.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie vetoed a state copper theft control measure in New Jersey last week, claiming it would impose “overly burdensome regulations” on the state’s scrap dealers. The bill would have required that all payments for scrap metal be made by non-transferrable check unless the seller has a photo ID on file with the scrap company, and that businesses could only accept deliveries made by motor vehicle, allowing firms to record the buyer’s plates and driver’s license.

Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), are tackling copper theft on the federal level by co-sponsoring the Metal Theft Prevention Act – a proposal to make stolen metal a federal crime.

Klobuchar

S. 394 and its House companion bill H.R. 867 would impose a 10-year prison sentence on anyone caught stealing metal from telephone or cell towers, highway equipment or other critical infrastructure. The bill would also make it tougher to fence stolen metal by requiring more record-keeping for recycling agents, and prohibiting them from paying cash for purchases larger than $100.

Klobuchar claims copper theft has shot up by 80 percent in recent years and she wants to put a dent in it.

“The recent rise in incidents of metal theft across the country underscores the importance of federal action to crack down on metal thieves, put them behind bars and make it more difficult for them to sell their stolen goods,” Klobuchar said.

Despite some bipartisan support, Govtrack.us estimates the measure has only a 7% chance of getting past committee and a 3% chance of being passed in the House of Representatives, noting the Republican-controlled body voted only 11% of bills out of committee and only about 3% were enacted over the last two years. The companion bill in the U.S. Senate has already passed a committee vote, so Govtrack estimates it has a 40% chance of passing a full Senate vote, assuming it is not filibustered.

The federal measure is getting significant opposition from Republicans who argue it violates states’ rights to manage the problem through legislation on the state level.

“I have heard concerns expressed regarding people stealing valuable metal and crossing state lines to sell the stolen product,” said Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah).  While I would support federal legislation addressed to such truly interstate circumstances, legislation that more broadly regulates intrastate conduct is constitutionally problematic. In my view, this bill exceeds Congress’s power under the Commerce Clause and imposes a federal regulatory scheme in an area of law the Constitution reserves to the states. In the interest of maintaining the balance between state and federal authority, I will vote against reporting this bill from the Judiciary Committee.”

Alling says in some communities copper thieves have gotten organized into gangs targeting valuable infrastructure, so while legislators work the problem on their end, local police need to organize themselves to combat it.

Alling said police should be on the lookout for thieves with tools like headlamps, bolt cutters and a change of clothes. Police should also search the area where the copper was stolen because often, the bad guys stash the metal nearby until they can remove it without getting caught.

Individuals can also report suspicious activity themselves by calling 911. In some areas, reward funds have been established by utilities for tips that lead to the successful prosecution of metal thieves.

[flv width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/KOMO Seattle Copper Thieves Plague Washington 9-10-13.mp4[/flv]

KOMO in Seattle reports Frontier Communications has been plagued with copper cable thefts for the last two years, cutting off critical 911 services to affected residents. (2 minutes)