| 15 weeks 1 day 10 hours ago Copper thieves ransack foreclosed houses
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(Prat Thakkar, NECN: Fitchburg, Mass.) - It's 12:30 p.m. and the door to a vacant foreclosed house on Marshall Street in Fitchburg, Massachusetts is latched from the inside. Worried, realtor Donna Brooks has flagged a passing police officer.
Past the broken-in back door, in the basement, the signs of hurried unwanted visitors are everywhere. The floor strewn with insulation, a hastily torn up stovetop, a smashed bathroom wall and…missing copper pipes. The multi-family home has become victim to the latest trend...copper theft.
About 45 miles away, in Lawrence, Massachusetts Police Chief John Romero holds up his latest evidence - some 200 feet of sawed-off electrical copper wire.
Across the country, foreclosed properties are becoming a hot commodity for copper thieves. They're in search of heating pipes, water pipes, electrical wires, just about anything copper. Wayne Little is a building inspector in Fitchburg.
Little: "The second the house becomes vacant, people go in and take out the copper and the plumbing fixtures."
This house in Fitchburg was broken into within two days of hitting the market. Finding out which home is foreclosed and vacant is easy. Keeping an eye on new 'for sale' signs is one option, but foreclosures are open public records so copper thieves look up the Registry of Deeds database or call realtors for the latest listings. There's good reason to keep pace with the foreclosures, some homes are broken into multiple times.
Getting
the goods is also about speed. In this house, they came in through a window likely using a Slim Jim.
At the Windfield Alloy Scrap Yard in Lawrence, Massachusetts, Manager Bob Costello sees the fruits of those copper break-ins. Sellers come in with tell tale signs.
To understand why copper is such a big draw, take for example a bundle of light iron. It's about 150 pounds and will bring you about $70 dollars. The same bundle in copper would weigh about 2,000 pounds, netting you anywhere from $5-6,000 dollars.
But for the homes and the homeowners, it's a much bigger hit. For example, in this home, not only were the heating pipes ripped, the thieves chopped off water pipes, but left the water running, the cellar flooded, the walls were covered in mold.
Donna Fitchburg: "So, if I'm someone who wants to buy this house, I have to replumb the entire house, fix the mold, fix the heating system and the hot water system, and whatever water damage there is to the floors? Uh huh uh huh."
Add to that, cities have a building code checklist. In some cities like Fitchburg, once the house is vacant for 6 months, and that's likely if there's major damage, the house must be brought up to the most modern building standards. That could mean fixing everything from chimneys and floors, to roofs and plumbing, costing tens of thousands of dollars.
The city of Lawrence has now begun reviewing scrap yard surveillance video to help make arrests, and they have a mayoral task force just to prevent such thefts. They meet every week, track foreclosed homes, patrol neighborhoods and inspect the houses regularly.
Lawrence has no choice. It has the third highest number of foreclosures in the state. City leaders remember the outcome of a similar wave in the 1980s. Donna Brooks, meanwhile, is resigned to selling the damaged properties for less than half their value.
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