‘Copper Fever’ Rages Throughout Russia’s Second City : Crime: Vandals are destroying everything from phone lines to traffic lights. They can sell the wiring for big rubles.

They call it “copper fever,” and it’s destroying Russia’s second city. Thieves scavenging for the precious metal have torn up phone lines, nearly crippled the railroad, stopped trolley cars cold and stalled elevators citywide, all for the sake of tiny copper parts.

“It’s become a nightmarish disaster,” said Larisa Medvedeva, dispatcher for the City Emergency Elevator Service. “Every day we get dozens of calls. If before only drunk hooligans broke the elevators, now it’s thieves. We don’t have enough people, and soon our stores of copper parts and wires will run out.”

The spiriting away of Russia’s wealth to the industrialized nations is perhaps her greatest national calamity. Beautiful antiques, masterpieces of art, oceans of oil, precious gems and Siberian forests are being whisked to Paris and Tokyo, where they fetch desperately needed dollars.

And though “copper fever” has led to widespread pilfering in Moscow and other cities, St. Petersburg has an especially bad case. No other Russian city brings so much heavy industry and sprawling infrastructure so close to Russia’s “soft” borders with other former Soviet republics--in St. Petersburg’s case, with the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

In today’s Wild West Russia, where law enforcement is outflanked and outnumbered, it is now easier to pilfer copper in downtown St. Petersburg than to dig it out of the Urals ground.

On trains bound for Estonia, “almost every person has a knapsack with 50 or 60 kilograms (110 to 132 pounds) of copper wire,” said Viktor Cherkesov, chairman of the St. Petersburg branch of the Ministry of Security, the successor agency to the KGB.

At the Oktyaberskaya Railroad, which links St. Petersburg and the surrounding region by electric train, thieves have inflicted 700 million rubles ($700,000) in damage.

“We have real copper fever here, like in Alaska in the 19th Century,” said Chief Engineer Vadim Morozov.

Hooligans have disabled signaling equipment and traffic lights by prying out tiny copper details. They have ripped up kilometers of copper wire that carried high-voltage power along the tracks, sending electrical systems haywire.

“Some of our trains are simply destroyed,” Morozov said. “The majority of our traffic lights don’t work, so our trains have to travel very slowly, communicating by radio with the dispatcher.”

He said it has now become dangerous to approach the rails. What he calls “wandering shocks,” spontaneous electrical blasts, have appeared up and down the tracks. So far, no one has been hurt.

Fewer and fewer trains are running, and the reduced schedule has infuriated passengers.

Petersburgers headed for their dachas , or country homes, now start lining up at stations at night in hopes of fighting their way onto the next morning’s trains.

According to Security Ministry records, in 1992 more than 100 kilometers of telephone cables filled with high-quality copper were stolen from St. Petersburg and its surrounding region, an area the size of Belgium.

Much of the theft is petty--workers smuggling spools of copper wire out of factories under their coats. But thieves have also developed an appetite for bronze, nickel and other metals and have pried precious bronze tablets from headstones at the Jewish Cemetery.

“It’s gotten out of control,” said Boris Stepanov, assistant director of one of St. Petersburg’s largest cemeteries. “We aren’t turning to the police anymore. From now on, if we see anyone vandalizing the tombstones, we’re just going to kill them.”

The scrap can be sold for roughly 15 cents a kilogram at kiosks that have sprung up all across town. From the kiosks, the metals are passed on to larger sites; from there, they are often sold to the West.

At the power company, officials spoke only reluctantly for fear of calling thieves’ attention to miles of bronze and copper wires.

“There have been incidents when they’ve tampered with temporary cables and transformer boxes,” said Boris Kuzimin, director of the joint stock company Cable Net LenEnergo. “I don’t understand how those (rogues) don’t get killed when they hack apart a 380-volt cable with an ax.”