Plunder Road : Thieves Prey on Metal Fixtures Along State’s Byways

When the men arrived and started working on the bridge, folks living nearby and farmers working an adjoining field assumed that the county was just doing some repair work.

But the men were not a Butte County road crew, they were thieves. And they had not come to fix the bridge, but to strip it--the third bridge stripped bare in daylight raids last month in rural Butte County alone.

With nettlesome frequency, swift and shameless crooks are taking advantage of record-high aluminum prices by making off with guardrails, traffic signs and any other scrap of aluminum they can find along California freeways.

Happening All Over

“It’s not unique to us,” said Bill Cheff, public works director for Butte County, 175 miles northeast of San Francisco. “It’s happening all over the state.”

“They will take everything--guardrails, signs, even those little plastic cones,” said California Department of Transportation spokesman Jim Drago. “I don’t even know what they do with the cones.”

Indeed, thefts are now so common that Caltrans is asking scrap dealers and motorists, particularly those with car phones, to keep an eye out for freeway raiders and alert the California Highway Patrol when they suspect that a theft is in progress.

“We’re trying to get the word out that if they see a suspicious character on the freeway--someone who is not wearing one of our orange vests and white hard hats--they should call in right away,” Drago said.

California is not the only state being hit. Texas, for example, also has seen some of Houston’s streets cleaned of storm drain grates and other salvageable metal. Six bridges were picked clean in one especially bad stretch in April.

Although the raiders will saw off and cart away almost anything they think they can sell, a favorite target is the tubular aluminum guardrail that lines many freeway overpasses. Some thieves work alone, others in small groups; more than a few toil in broad daylight as CHP cars speed past.

Most authorities assume the rails are filched for resale to scrap merchants (aluminum prices have been so high this year that the once workaday commodity has at times cost more than copper) but Cheff has his own idea.

“At first, we thought the stuff was being stolen for scrap, too, because aluminum prices have been so high,” he said. “But railings also make good irrigation pipe, so maybe they’re taken by people growing illegal crops.”

In this county of rice fields and almond orchards, the biggest illegal crop is the marijuana grown in the Sierra foothills.

At a replacement cost Cheff figures at $10 a foot--roughly twice what the thieves get in salvage--the theft of several hundred feet of railing a month stings. This county, like many rural counties, is feeling delayed effects from the tax-slashing initiatives of the 1970s. With no money to keep its libraries open or provide adequate sheriff patrols, the county cannot afford its bridge-strippers, Cheff said.

$120,000 Replacement Cost

Caltrans spent $120,000 replacing stolen railings in the first six months of the year, while some counties spent from $5,000 to $20,000 apiece.

Catching the crooks has proven difficult. One of the few arrests so far was made in San Diego County in May, when a CHP officer offered to help what he thought was a stranded motorist on an overpass in the town of Alpine. When he pulled up, the officer found a 30-year-old San Diego man with a saw and a stack of 16 newly pinched rails. The man was arrested on suspicion of grand theft.

Exasperated by Thefts

Caltrans is so exasperated with the thefts that Drago said the department is considering switching to fiberglass materials, imprinting electronic codes on other materials and experimenting with theft-resistant fasteners.

Cheff said his county agency tried to foil the crooks by stripping threads on the railings’ aluminum bolts, but thieves merely ripped off the malleable aluminum nuts. Now the county is using spot-welded steel fasteners.

“They can probably still break them off,” he shrugged, “but at least it will take a little more time, and make their lives a little harder. They have sure done that to me.”