Feb 14, 2013 2 min read

Up to 200 Verizon customers in Independence Township were without telephone service last weekend after someone stole 500 feet of copper cable from a utility pole on Meadowcroft Road.

“We received the report Friday and the cable was replaced Sunday,” said Verizon spokesman Lee Gierczynski.

According to Gierczynski, the company received reports of the service outage from 21 customers. And while the cable contained 200 phone lines, he said it’s unsure how many of them were to active customers.

Theft of copper cable is nothing new to the telephone company. Gierczynski said that in 2012, Verizon was the victim of 23 incidents across the state, and so far this year, there have been five.

“It’s an issue the industry has always had to deal with,” he explained. “It happens more often than you would think.”

He added, “It happens more than we would like.”

In most cases, thieves target poles in rural areas where there’s not a lot of traffic. They cut off the cable and then head straight for a scrap yard. The copper in the cable is often worth thousands of dollars, Gierczynski said.

While the thefts are costly to Verizon, Gierczynski said the company is more concerned about the risk to public safety, especially when considering the need to call 911 in the case of an emergency.

“They’re putting people’s lives in danger,” he said.