"Cut it out before you could kill yourself or someone else." That is the message from police to copper wire thieves clipping live powerlines in the Manawatū.
So far this year thieves have stolen about 10,000 metres of PowerCo wire in the rural area.
Police area prevention manager Inspector Ross Grantham told Checkpoint it was risky business for the thieves and anyone nearby after the damage was done.
"We're talking thousands and thousands of volts going through these cables at the time they cut them," Grantham said.
Either the thieves were climbing up power poles to cut the lines or were using an extended device to cut the cables while standing on the ground, he said.
"Both idiotic and high risk."
Photo: Supplied / NZ Police
Information from PowerCo showed thieves were targeting rural areas of the Manawatū, Grantham said.
"They get longer runs of the cable, and of course it's out in the middle of nowhere, and very few people to see them.
"Cables can be left dangling. And of course that's a live cable, which is tremendously risky to anybody who approaches it, especially touches it. But even getting close to it, there's tremendous risk.
"The other is cutting the earth cables. PowerCo have gone through and changed a lot of them from copper to another metal conductor. Of course that has no great value, so they cut it, leave it, and that makes that whole area around there live.
"So what they're doing is a tremendous risk to the public."
Ross Grantham. Photo: RNZ / Alexander Robertson
In the last few months the scrap metal price of copper had risen dramatically, Grantham said. Currently it is about $US4.69 ($NZ6.49) a pound.
"That's what they're trading on. Once that price drops down again, this becomes less of a problem.
"We've been around our local scrap merchants and advised them. They tell us they're not buying it, so we're working really hard to try and identify where it's going to.
"We could have someone just buying it in the Manawatū and keeping it under the radar until they're ready to sell it on. And of course, there are ways of modifying it, so perhaps it isn't so recognisable."
Grantham thought it would be a small group of people.
"Obviously they have some knowledge of how the power system works, but some knowledge is very dangerous.
"They're very clever in which parts they do cut, and they'll be operating generally at night time, in the early hours of the morning."
Grantham's message to the public was to not go near any cut cables.
"If... they see someone who's a bit suspicious hanging around power poles, parked up in an odd space. If they get their registration number or ring police immediately, we will certainly try and attend and see if we can't apprehend these offenders before anyone's seriously injured."
And his message to the thieves: "You've got to cut it out, because if you're not going to kill yourself, you're going to seriously injure or kill someone else. And it's just not what I want to happen in my community."
