i bet that's wrong….do signs get stolen? is there an international sign smuggling cartel?

Yep, lot been on the news recently. That label isn't strictly true, scrap steel has some minimal value. The ones getting knicked tend to be the aluminium ones though as clean scrap aluminium has a value of around £ 800 per tonne.

It's a bit like the sticker 'no tools left in this van overnight' …………… yeah right 🙄

Loads get stolen from the A14 just North of Cambridge – coincidently that stretch has a local council traveller park on it – which I suspect has a lot to do with it.

Darcy will be along in a minute…….

but you'd have to nick about 200 signs to get a tonne together, what a waste of time. It's funny isn't it, lots of criminals could get a whole lot more money together if they just went out and got a no brainer job.

Instead they spend huge amounts of effort and presumably a whole load of stress and worry, going out and nicking petty crap.

Yeah this happens all the time, a guy from Chevron traffic management said his signs get nicked all the time. He told me this as we were repairing a copper cable that someone had stolen 100 metres of on the side of a motorway.

Big probelms with sign thefts around Sudbury in Suffolf at the moment. The moment they council replace them, they get nicked. Time and time again this is happening.

Trains have been disrupted by signal failures brought about by people stealing the cabling.

Manhole covers were getting stolen at one stage.

Farmers used to block up fields with old machinery to stop Pikeys getting in. Now this old gear is being stolen for scrap. The fields remain clear however.

Good job there is a recession keeping the demand for raw materials low and therefore their prices.

Sad little people pilfering like this eh?

My fave

We're currently installing a load of security measures for a well known electricity company who are experiencing cable theft. It seems the MO is, break into the substation, short out the circuit by placing a spade across the two cables, start sawing away.

The company has started installing remote breakers that can be reset very quickly rather than sending chaps out in a van. So what i forsee is, spade is pressed across the cables, electronic fuse trips, the operations centre is alerted, wait 30 seconds and then reset the fuse, meanwhile the crim has started sawing away on a 500 kV AC cable….. oh, hello? hello? He seems to have disappeared.

Great idea, but they'll just go for the comms first. Can't see it conforming IEE regs either. Shame.

It's a *really* big electricity company, I suspect they'd got the regs covered before we even started discussing the tech details.

They'd be hard pressed to have a go at the comms too, it's all done over GPRS.

If you say so, i'd love to see the risk assessment for it. To be honest they'll probably just turn their attention to softer targets like my cables, after the first time anyway.

savage curcut breaker scaenario 8O…as a knock on effect theft of man-made trails will rise i tell ya… 😀

We must not credit these people with enough intelligence to know better, instead we should leave piles of scrap near know drug dealers houses. Customers can buy more drugs and hopefully over dose.

there is a town not far from where I used to live called..yes… Shirley.. and I can't tell you how often the signpost on the edge of town was stolen.