Thursday, February 14, 2008

Moron tries to use hacksaw on power cable...

Reuters reports that police "in in central England are hunting for a badly scorched would-be copper power cable thief after finding a hacksaw embedded in an 11,000 volt power cable Saturday night.
The thief, who also left a lit blow torch at the scene, is expected to be badly charred, spiky haired and not exactly the brightest bulb in the socket.
"The sheer stupidity of cutting through power cables should be glaringly obvious to everyone," said Phil Wilson, customer operations manager with local power company Central Networks.
"At the very least putting the hacksaw through the cable would have created an almighty bang and the line would have burned for quite a few seconds, showering them with molten copper... We can only assume they left in a great hurry or they were injured and were dragged away by an accomplice." But searches of local hospitals have so far not found the culprit, a spokeswoman for Derbyshire Police said Tuesday.
"Maybe they had a lucky escape," she said. "We don't have any leads yet."
Nearly 800 customers in the village of Creswell were cut off when the wannabe copper thief sawed into their power supply on Saturday night, but Central Networks got the lights back on within a few hours.
Copper prices have more than doubled in the last four years as China has gobbled up huge quantities of it, sparking a wave of copper thefts across the globe from South Africa and the United States to Italy and Britain.
Thieves targeting power lines and electricity substations have already led to two fatalities in Britain and many serious injuries, while leaving thousands without power."

7 comments:

GeologyJoe said...

Nearly a Darwin Award candidate.

Kimba The White Lioness said...

Maybe the person is dead and was dragged away by their accomplice! Oh, how I LOVE a good mystery! My husband (who is an electrical engineer that works for the power company here in Michigan) said he didn't think anyone could survive that amount of electricution, unprotected. If you see any followup on the story, please post it! I'd love to hear whether or not they end up finding the person - and if so, dead or alive?! It amazes me what people will do for a few bucks. Could somebody REALLY be so desperate that they would risk life and limb like this? It's hard to fathom. I mean, I KNOW there are desperate people in the world today - there always have been. But doing something like this just defies all LOGIC and common sense!

Tom Evans said...

Classic stuff. I represent idiots like that sometimes.

The All Seeing Eye said...

Thanks for your comments, Geologyjoe, Dan, Kimba, and Tom. It is much appreciated. This guy should have been vieo taping his efforts.

prin said...

OMG that cracked me up! thanks for the laugh!

prin said...

OMG that cracked me up! thanks for the laugh!

The All Seeing Eye said...

You're welcome, Prin. I couldn't stop laughing either. And welcome to my blog!