Something had gone incorrect with the enormous radio tower. Will Payne, of Payne Media Group, acquired an alert from his utility firm in the course of the evening telling him as a lot. But it wasn’t till he acquired to the positioning round 5am, in subzero temperatures, that he realized what had occurred.

The tower in query, a 499-foot mast in the course of a subject in Hugo, Oklahoma, was virtually as tall because the UN constructing in New York. It broadcast K95.5—a radio station for Oklahoma and Texas that performs “Continuous Country.”

When Payne pulled up it was nonetheless pitch black outdoors, however the headlights on his truck picked out one thing on the bottom.

He couldn’t consider it. The prime half of the tower was mendacity in tatters, a crumpled mess of white and purple painted metal. Payne might additionally see that the small constructing on the base of the tower had been damaged into. He backed his truck out and referred to as the cops.

“It’s your worst nightmare,” says Payne, who later that morning inspected the ruins, discovering that meters and meters of inches-thick coaxial copper cable had apparently been stolen from the stricken mast, ripped out with energy instruments. “I built this tower in 2017, and so, to me, it’s brand new. It’s just heart-breaking.”

Metal theft is on the rise, largely linked to soaring commodity prices. Copper is roughly 30 % dearer than it was 5 years in the past, for instance, whereas metal spiked 200 percent through the pandemic, although costs have settled down considerably within the final two years. As such, thieves have taken to swiping all the things from drain covers to miles of copper cabling. The conduits that maintain folks related, the infrastructure that civilization is determined by—it’s all honest sport for a metallic bandit. The disruption brought about is commonly completely disproportionate to the face worth of the stolen materials.

As the world electrifies, and as we rely increasingly more on equipment full of copper, metal, and valuable metals, this type of theft is getting ever extra critical. Meanwhile, victims are left questioning—isn’t there any approach to cease it?

Metal theft is actually not new. For occasion, historians surmise that in addition to gold and valuable stones, historical thieves stole metal razor blades from the tomb of the Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun. These implements had been presumably melted down and traded.

Because our lives are so completely depending on metallic infrastructure, thefts are arguably extra damaging than ever immediately. Earlier this month, metallic thieves struck the German railway system, quickly “paralyzing” it.

In India, there have been experiences of a 1 km stretch of metal fencing being stolen from a serious freeway, and a whole bridge was allegedly stolen in 2022. Cable theft on the transit community in South Africa is so prolific that teachers are writing papers about the way it has affected the free flow of traffic within the nation. And some thieves are even stealing metallic plaques from gravestones in cemeteries—this has occurred each in the UK and the US.