>He applied to the courts for permanent possession of the home and won following an appeal, despite the judge accepting that he had committed criminal trespass. According to new reports, Mr Best has now sold the home for a huge profit.
You should also check if the coverage depends on who does the stealing. Like, if your house is stolen into the spirit world like in Poltergeist. Clearly, this wasn't an act of God.
The tweet says "a tower site" which implies they have others. It's entirely possible/likely that they have multiple towers for better coverage; if one went down they would lose some coverage area but not all of it.
It's an AM station, so they may also shut down overnight (as many small stations do to avoid over-propagation).
Off topic: I could have guessed that guy was a radio station manager without any context. There's just a look to them.
The tweet said that they took a crew with a bush hog ([1]) to "do early cleanup of the property before we do more work down there". So this was almost certainly a long-abandoned radio tower that they acquired and were planning to bring into service. The grass needs to be severely overgrown before you need a bush hog.
> The grass needs to be severely overgrown before you need a bush hog.
Use of a bush hug does not imply the need for a bush hog, though. Even for routine maintenance of the grass you're apt to choose the bush hog out of convenience and practicality. It's not like you're going to waste time puttering around with the push mower you cut your grass at home with for a tower site out in the middle of nowhere.
A single season of no maintenance in rural Alabama could easily allow the property to be full of Giant Hogweed[1] which seems to allow UV light to penetrate our skin a lot more easily, causing severe burns. Especially around a tower where birds roost and spread droppings for 100 feet around the area.
I used to mow the grass at an active radio station. I occasionally had to DR a path to each tower so they could do maintenance. They don't regularly mow the fields where the towers are, though Toro did occasionally come out and mow the whole thing as a test site for new mowers, which was neat.
These towers often have several sets of tension cables at various heights, so you could cut the outermost/tallest set, drop the top-third of the tower, and work your way down. Still dangerous, but it's not always "bring all 500' down at once".
Sure, but if you’ve ever been around high tension mental cables before you’ll realize you need a huge pair of balls to cut those. It’s not safety protocols, it’s fear that it might cut you in half.
I had the same question. Intuitively, I don’t think so, but that’s based on nothing but simulating it in my head. In reality you might risk the tower collapsing on you if you cut too many.
That's how I would do it without remote cutters, a small shaped charge, or thermite. Fall direction will be completely out of control, so it would be worth being close to the tower to reach a safe area.
I don't see how you would have less control by backing off tensioners vs. destructive approach. You don't have to release all guys at once in either case.
Almost certainly that tower was of galvanized steel, so if the mystery adbuctors had knowledge of welding or metallurgy (no idea if that was the case) they'd know that plasma cutters would be toxic overkill unless they knew how to paint/paste where they cut. Portable chop saws would do just fine. I witnessed pros take down a radio tower by remote-controlled chop saws cutting the guy wires sequentially.
Old timers will say, incorrectly, "just drink some milk"
On a serious note, a short term exposure like this probably wouldn't be that harmful*, and they seem like risk-takers already so the hazards are factored in for them.
I think the issue is that some people are willing to work quite hard, but only intermittently. (Though that doesn't necessarily disqualify them from being a contractor either, I suppose.)
Most people don't fear hard work, they fear being beholden to other people. Ain't nobody hiring a contractor under the terms of "Yeah, go ahead and build me a house however you like, whenever you feel like it. I don't care about what you do."
My feeling is that metal theft is getting out of control. If the news reporting on it is to be trusted, cases are in fact rising. Thieves have probably always hit junkyards and stolen wire, but now there seems to be more and more infrastructure hit as well.
The oddest aspect of this is that scrap steel isn't even worth that much. How many tons could that be? Let's say it's 400 tons, that's maybe $100k. And it seems like extremely high risk, because they're going to be looking for this everywhere now. Why would they not just steal two or three cars, which would never make the news. They must be skilled to pull something like that off in a night.
Edit: Another user linked the street view, apparently the article image wasn't the actual tower. So based on that it's much less metal even.
Everyone loves a stupid criminal, so it would make sense it would be a local scrapyard. If they were "smart", they would split it up across multiple scrapyards so that it was much less obvious. The fun thing would be to find a new tower that suddenly appeared in another location that happens to look just like this missing one.
In the broad I agree, but in this specific case, I don't think poor people can dismantle a 200' steel radio tower without anyone noticing. I'm guessing that would require some heavy, expensive equipment.
Poverty is not itself a reason to commit crime. Some people steal whether they are poor or rich, others don't, whether they are poor or rich.
Around here, it's mostly organized gangs doing the stealing, not random poor people... If that were the case, the city wouldn't have a single light fixture left unscathed.
Of course not. It would be absurd to assert otherwise. You always get some scofflaws, but I don't see a reason to assume you get more scofflaws in a weak economy than a strong one. More lawbreakers, yes, but breaking laws for economically rational reasons isn't the same as doing so for its own sake.
I would be curious to know where the people who join such groups come from, and what other prospects they might have had such that difficult, dangerous, and illegal work still ends up looking preferable.
Limited experience based on what my friend told me (I grew up in a rural community, so very different dynamics): it starts in schools.
Gangs start recruiting young. It's a fast way to get "friends" who have more than you do- the illusion of power, material wealth, so on.
Furthermore, attempting to do well in school means your fellow students will bully you for "acting white".
If your parents didn't do well in school, they are less likely to pressure you to do well. They might be working long hours to make ends meet, or living on disability or either form of welfare. This will exclude you from many extracurricular activities which require parental support as well.
If you see your parents barely making ends meet, and gangbangers offer you the illusion of more, and everyone around you says you'll never amount to anything by studying or trying to get good grades, it isn't hard to see the allure.
So, for these students at least, poverty is a culture and the trap becomes lifelong once you get a record and can't get a job anywhere that pays better than minimum wage. Rinse and repeat with the next generation.
My friend was fortunate enough to have a father who pressured him to do well in school, and to go on to secondary education. He escaped the trap, but few of the people he grew up with did the same.
And if you tell anything of the above on a public forum, you'd be immediately canceled and branded a "racist". It's amazing how the current progressive elite is undermining themselves.
Can you name an example of this happening? Because OP's narrative is very common in a lot of "progressive" places in in the media. It's one of the core ideas of progressivism that poverty is a trap and that people need help from the government to escape it.
I can think of some other less mainstream news sources that would have a problem with that idea.
It's probably the part where I mentioned the cultural aspect of my friend's experience, including trying hard in school resulting in being scoffed at or bullied for "acting white".
Also, the "people need the governments help to escape it" was very much not the moral of this particular parable. All it took was a father who gave a damn.
Here are her exact words: "Especially in the Black and brown community, I see one of the biggest challenges as being the lack of family support for those students... Unstable family environments caused by housing and food insecurity along with lack of parental encouragement to focus on learning cause children to not be able to focus on or value learning"
> It's one of the core ideas of progressivism that poverty is a trap and that people need help from the government to escape it.
Except that somehow it also adopted a notion that certain groups are forever victims. Black communities are struggling? That's because of white supremacy and systemic racism. So we need to double the struggle against the white supremacy.
Investigating the causes of Black struggles? That's racist.
when the price of copper went through the roof a few years ago the local drug houses in Dallas started accepting it as payment for drugs. They would then sell the metal to scrap yards at a profit. Once that was up and running any copper left unguarded was gone instantly. Air conditioners were gone, wiring in new construction was gone, wiring in rent houses was gone, any copper anywhere was stolen constantly. I remember seeing people pushing shopping carts in Old East Dallas filled with copper cables, pipes, and other stuf.
There was a story probably once a month about someone breaking into a power substation or some other high voltage area to try and steal copper and electrocuting themselves.
Metal thieves who are exchanging wiring for cash for drugs are even more impulsive than other street criminals. Sometimes raising the bar a bit can make a big difference.
Around here most of them require an electrical or plumbing contractor's license to sell that stuff. There's an online system to verify the license, and one of the conditions of the license is purchasing a bond and insurance.
In an area around nearby, years ago (in the sticks...) someone went up the power lines through the woods and clipped all the bare grounding wire from miles of poles from about 8 feet up to the ground.
Criminals don't make sense to you because you're trying to explain their behavior with your own thought process. You're likely much smarter than they are, with a better understanding of risk vs reward and lower impulsivity.
Also you can't explain criminal behavior with purely financial motivations. Car thieves are not making $33k per car. A lot of them don't even sell them, just steal what's inside and use them for a joy ride (ask me how I know). Lots of petty criminals and drug dealers are not making very much money, especially for the level of risk. But compared to a traditional job it's much less restrictive, fun and exciting, lets you hang out with your friends most of the time, and has a lot more social clout with their peers than traditional employment.
IMO, they should be playing games or sports instead. Give people more opportunities to do just what you said (instead of working supposedly boring (at least to them) jobs), instead of hurting people/property to achieve that.
> Why would they not just steal two or three cars,
Is this a real question? You're coming at this with the position that car theft is so easy because it's easy to get away with and has a high rate of return. That only works if you have the connections with chop shops or exporters to be able to get money for that car. You also have to have the skills/tools for being able to steal the car in the first place. To flip that, the people that do steal cars would probably have no clue on how to dismantle a steel structure, have the means to load/haul that steel, or know what recycling places will even buy from them without immediately reporting it to police.
I highly doubt it's worth 100k as scrap. The "6 figures" price tag was to replace it. Maybe they have some way to sell this equipment for its original purpose, but if they are selling it for scrap it'll go for a tiny fraction of what it would be worth in working condition.
~5 years ago when I was driving back and forth to an adjacent state to work on our house to get it on the market, I discover my ground wire had been stolen. It was no more than 2' long and was the only exposed wire outside. The house was on a very rural 2 mile road with only 7-8 other houses. They had to be desperate.
The tower can get some stub legs welded on and it'll be good as new, at least $10,000 worth, maybe as much as $15,000. The 200' self supporting tower I've been eying is $11,000 used.
400 tons is 800k pounds or 10 fully laden semi trailers of material, it’s definitely not anywhere near that much. I bet you could fit the whole thing on one flatbed with room to spare.
As a reference: A 10-foot section of Rohn 45G weighs about 70 pounds. 200 feet of 45G is thus about 1,400 pounds -- less than a ton.
(I do not know if this particular tower was Rohn 45G or something else that may be heavier -- I only know that it was a guyed tower, and that (when guyed) 45G can be stacked beyond 200 feet.)
they can get resourceful that's for sure. A family friend had a catalytic converter stolen in the parking lot of a grocery store when they stopped to pick up a few things. Stealing a catalytic converter involves cutting parts of the exhaust system out of a car.
A lot of Priuses in my neighborhood lost their catalytic converters a few winters ago. Mostly this happened at night, so there was more time than for whoever hit your friend's car..
Skilled thieves can do that with a battery powered saw in less than 30 seconds, there's been more than enough videos on youtube showing just how easy it is.
Cheap battery powered tools have made a lot of crime a hell of a lot easier.
Someone who needs a 200' self-supporting tower. Getting one from Rohn is probably $15,000 to $20,000 and more than half that used. I've been shopping towers for several years and when I read the headline my first thought was "yeah, Starlink needs a clear view of the sky" not "some meth head tryin' to sell steel for scrap."
The world has changed in odd ways. Ten or twenty years ago, this would seem like very ambitious drug addicts. Today, there’s a real chance that this will turn out to be a prank for Internet cred. And as strange or unlikely as that sounds, a guy recently made the news for intentionally crashing a plane for internet cred. I sure never would have imagined that.
We live in interesting times and that’s not always a good thing.
Seems like there could be more to the story.. perhaps an alternate explanation than scrap value. a giant steel frame for an antenna would have scrap value, but relatively not that much. For a lot less hassle and more money you could grab a couple semi trailers and cut them up, they are usually just laying around unhooked.
Then again I guess meth heads aren’t masters of cost benefit analysis
I agree.
A tire manufacturing plant closed in my home city back in the early 2000s. I guy we knew from high school wanted the copper that came to the plant under ground in a vault. He figured for some reason it was disco … and blam fried his legs and hands completely cooked all his nerves in them and apparently one of his teeth exploded.. I mean , why would they turn service off to a manufacturing plant when they can just pull the meter ?
This happened in Amsterdam a couple of decades ago. There was a newly minted industrial area on the other side of a bridge and the power company had temporarily run a pretty beefy hookup to the other side of the canal (Zeeburgerdijk) to power the various businesses there. The cable was about 4" thick. One night the power went out without warning and the power company showed up, when they found the break they found a hacksaw embedded in the cable fused solidly to the cable guts.
They never bothered to file a report with the police because they figured whoever did that had been punished enough and sure enough there was a report of a guy with massive burns reporting to a nearby hospital that same night.
In south africa we have multiple stories of people destroying massive power transmission systems for the smallest piece of copper pipe or conductor thats exposed on the side of a transformer.
Metal theft is almost universally not accompanied by common sense.
South Africa is one the most unequal and dangerous advanced economies where middle class white people almost universally live in fortified compounds. Desperation, unemployment, and crushing poverty is what drives such property crime.
A friend of mine lived in the suburbs of Moscow in 1991. The family was watching TV when suddenly the power went out. It turns out someone stole the power lines to sell for scrap. Infrastructure cannibalism is a sign of civilization on the verge of collapse.
Fun fact, my grandparents moved into that house. It was cheap, and within a year they found part of an undetonated pipe bomb in the shed in the back which the ATF came and confiscated.
Jasper is a strange place. You hear of meth heads, being in north central AL and all. But the town has a unique history and there are actually a lot of really rich folks and nice neighborhoods there. It's an old mining town with a lot of old money, and rich folk from all over move there because of Smith lake. It used to be "the hitman capital" of the US and I've heard stories from a pilot friend of an umarked and unidentified black leer jet transporting shady individuals/cargo that used to frequent the Walker County Airport.
This is totally Walker county. It was an AM station so it probably took the owner the weekend to look into it. We’ve got local stations near me that relay to the top of a nearby mountain and weather or road conditions can delay repairing that local station. I have family in Jasper, this really happened it’s wild that’s it’s national news.
I'm not particularly susceptible to jump scares in movies or anything shocking really, but, this movie had me on the edge of my seat.
Good movie, much better than expected. Watch some of the making of features too, they filmed it all "real" (up on a 50ft tower or something) and it shows in the acting.
The thing about this theft is that in order for it to be worth the effort, there needs to be a buyer.
Is the FBI looking into what must be an organized metal salvage pipeline? First the salvage place needs to pay the thieves, no questions asked and no paper trail involved, then they need to pile it or chop it up, then sell it on to industrial factories that can use it, who must look the other way in terms of knowing about the source of the metal.
This involves (among other crimes) tax evasion, book keeping fraud, money laundering, secrecy and probably a lot of bribery.
I mean, if I can't buy pseudoephedrine without the state recording my license, surely it'd be pretty straightforward to require the same to sell copper.
Thanks for sharing, interesting forum post by radio experts. The conclusions they suggest like it being removed because they didn't pay their lease and just transmitted from their translator makes sense.
258 comments
[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 358 ms ] threadThe guy in Luton whose house was stolen did get it back, but it took two years.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-67356...
https://www.edinburghlive.co.uk/news/uk-world-news/squatter-...
>He applied to the courts for permanent possession of the home and won following an appeal, despite the judge accepting that he had committed criminal trespass. According to new reports, Mr Best has now sold the home for a huge profit.
It's an AM station, so they may also shut down overnight (as many small stations do to avoid over-propagation).
Off topic: I could have guessed that guy was a radio station manager without any context. There's just a look to them.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brush_hog
Use of a bush hug does not imply the need for a bush hog, though. Even for routine maintenance of the grass you're apt to choose the bush hog out of convenience and practicality. It's not like you're going to waste time puttering around with the push mower you cut your grass at home with for a tower site out in the middle of nowhere.
1. https://www.al.com/news/2018/07/giant_hogweed_plant_on_alaba...
Yup I’ve got a face for radio as well.
https://mythresults.com/episode62
https://www.nytimes.com/1981/12/04/us/around-the-nation-two-...
On a serious note, a short term exposure like this probably wouldn't be that harmful*, and they seem like risk-takers already so the hazards are factored in for them.
That's about what a large pickup truck can haul.
Copper is worth 20x more.
I dunno, if you're willing to work that hard you could probably just become a contractor.
My feeling is that metal theft is getting out of control. If the news reporting on it is to be trusted, cases are in fact rising. Thieves have probably always hit junkyards and stolen wire, but now there seems to be more and more infrastructure hit as well.
The oddest aspect of this is that scrap steel isn't even worth that much. How many tons could that be? Let's say it's 400 tons, that's maybe $100k. And it seems like extremely high risk, because they're going to be looking for this everywhere now. Why would they not just steal two or three cars, which would never make the news. They must be skilled to pull something like that off in a night.
Edit: Another user linked the street view, apparently the article image wasn't the actual tower. So based on that it's much less metal even.
They'll find the scrapyard that received it and track it down from there. Unless it was done months ago and they just finally noticed.
Not just someone dropping a tower for scrap.
I'll settle for "inside job to get the FCC to give them a license for whatever".
People are why we can't have nice things, apparently.
There. Is. Always. An. Asshole.
Always.
Around here, it's mostly organized gangs doing the stealing, not random poor people... If that were the case, the city wouldn't have a single light fixture left unscathed.
Of course not. It would be absurd to assert otherwise. You always get some scofflaws, but I don't see a reason to assume you get more scofflaws in a weak economy than a strong one. More lawbreakers, yes, but breaking laws for economically rational reasons isn't the same as doing so for its own sake.
I would be curious to know where the people who join such groups come from, and what other prospects they might have had such that difficult, dangerous, and illegal work still ends up looking preferable.
Gangs start recruiting young. It's a fast way to get "friends" who have more than you do- the illusion of power, material wealth, so on.
Furthermore, attempting to do well in school means your fellow students will bully you for "acting white".
If your parents didn't do well in school, they are less likely to pressure you to do well. They might be working long hours to make ends meet, or living on disability or either form of welfare. This will exclude you from many extracurricular activities which require parental support as well.
If you see your parents barely making ends meet, and gangbangers offer you the illusion of more, and everyone around you says you'll never amount to anything by studying or trying to get good grades, it isn't hard to see the allure.
So, for these students at least, poverty is a culture and the trap becomes lifelong once you get a record and can't get a job anywhere that pays better than minimum wage. Rinse and repeat with the next generation.
My friend was fortunate enough to have a father who pressured him to do well in school, and to go on to secondary education. He escaped the trap, but few of the people he grew up with did the same.
I can think of some other less mainstream news sources that would have a problem with that idea.
Also, the "people need the governments help to escape it" was very much not the moral of this particular parable. All it took was a father who gave a damn.
Easy. Ann Hsu, a school board member in SF: https://sfstandard.com/2022/07/19/racially-insensitive-schoo...
Here are her exact words: "Especially in the Black and brown community, I see one of the biggest challenges as being the lack of family support for those students... Unstable family environments caused by housing and food insecurity along with lack of parental encouragement to focus on learning cause children to not be able to focus on or value learning"
> It's one of the core ideas of progressivism that poverty is a trap and that people need help from the government to escape it.
Except that somehow it also adopted a notion that certain groups are forever victims. Black communities are struggling? That's because of white supremacy and systemic racism. So we need to double the struggle against the white supremacy.
Investigating the causes of Black struggles? That's racist.
Always has been. With that said, this is incredibly impressive from a logistics perspective. Hire these folks for demolition and salvage work.
There was a story probably once a month about someone breaking into a power substation or some other high voltage area to try and steal copper and electrocuting themselves.
Seems like a lot of work for low money.
Planet Money did an episode on it.
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/628890875
Is this a real question? You're coming at this with the position that car theft is so easy because it's easy to get away with and has a high rate of return. That only works if you have the connections with chop shops or exporters to be able to get money for that car. You also have to have the skills/tools for being able to steal the car in the first place. To flip that, the people that do steal cars would probably have no clue on how to dismantle a steel structure, have the means to load/haul that steel, or know what recycling places will even buy from them without immediately reporting it to police.
As a reference: A 10-foot section of Rohn 45G weighs about 70 pounds. 200 feet of 45G is thus about 1,400 pounds -- less than a ton.
(I do not know if this particular tower was Rohn 45G or something else that may be heavier -- I only know that it was a guyed tower, and that (when guyed) 45G can be stacked beyond 200 feet.)
edit: quote from https://www.al.com/news/2024/02/someone-stole-a-jasper-radio...
Cheap battery powered tools have made a lot of crime a hell of a lot easier.
https://www.homedepot.com/p/Milwaukee-M18-FUEL-18V-Lithium-I...
We live in interesting times and that’s not always a good thing.
Then again I guess meth heads aren’t masters of cost benefit analysis
They never bothered to file a report with the police because they figured whoever did that had been punished enough and sure enough there was a report of a guy with massive burns reporting to a nearby hospital that same night.
https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/thieves-steal-16-feet-of-cop...
Metal theft is almost universally not accompanied by common sense.
A friend of mine lived in the suburbs of Moscow in 1991. The family was watching TV when suddenly the power went out. It turns out someone stole the power lines to sell for scrap. Infrastructure cannibalism is a sign of civilization on the verge of collapse.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-jul-29-mn-60726...
Jasper is a strange place. You hear of meth heads, being in north central AL and all. But the town has a unique history and there are actually a lot of really rich folks and nice neighborhoods there. It's an old mining town with a lot of old money, and rich folk from all over move there because of Smith lake. It used to be "the hitman capital" of the US and I've heard stories from a pilot friend of an umarked and unidentified black leer jet transporting shady individuals/cargo that used to frequent the Walker County Airport.
Crazy shit happens there for random reasons that probably won’t make sense to an outsider.
This could be as simple as someone having a beef with a person at the station or one of the content sources that the AM station broadcasts.
It could be something as simple as drunken weekend shenanigans. Why? Because they could.
Good movie, much better than expected. Watch some of the making of features too, they filmed it all "real" (up on a 50ft tower or something) and it shows in the acting.
https://cdn.scrippsnews.com/images/videos/x/1707511452_vrzZ9...
https://www.radioworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/WJLX.p...
Is the FBI looking into what must be an organized metal salvage pipeline? First the salvage place needs to pay the thieves, no questions asked and no paper trail involved, then they need to pile it or chop it up, then sell it on to industrial factories that can use it, who must look the other way in terms of knowing about the source of the metal.
This involves (among other crimes) tax evasion, book keeping fraud, money laundering, secrecy and probably a lot of bribery.
I mean, if I can't buy pseudoephedrine without the state recording my license, surely it'd be pretty straightforward to require the same to sell copper.
https://www.radiodiscussions.com/threads/wjlx-200-tower-repo...