By Samantha Delouya, CNN
Los Angeles (CNN) — Often strung from utility poles or buried beneath our feet, copper wire has played a critical role in powering America’s electrical grid for more than a century.
But brazen thefts are threatening the grid, with thieves climbing onto car roofs to cut down telephone lines or prying open manholes in broad daylight to strip copper wiring.
The effects have been felt nationwide: roads and bridges going dark, 911 calls that fail to connect and higher utility bills as replacement costs get passed on to consumers.
The price of copper has driven the thefts, said one detective at the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department who requested anonymity due to the undercover nature of his role.
This year, copper prices have reached all-time highs on a jump in new data center construction and speculation about new tariffs by the Trump administration, according to JPMorgan. In the United States, copper prices have climbed more than 30% this year.
Los Angeles has become one of the nation’s hot spots for copper wire theft. As the city recovers from its most destructive wildfires in a generation and prepares to host the World Cup this summer and the Olympics in 2028, it’s struggling in many places just to keep the lights on. The city and the utility companies spend millions each year repairing the damage.
There were more than 15,000 destructive attacks nationwide on domestic communication networks between June 2024 and June 2025, with copper theft a major driver, according to the TV and internet industry trade group, NCTA. More than 9.5 million customers were affected, with California and Texas alone accounting for over half of the incidents.
“This doesn’t happen just once a week or once a month,” the LASD detective said of copper thefts. “These things happen daily.”
Seven miles of copper wire, gone
When Los Angeles unveiled its newly built Sixth Street Bridge in 2022, it was hailed as a new city landmark. At night, the 3,500-foot bridge, with wide pedestrian walkways, would light up in shifting LED colors.
Three years later, the bridge sits dark.
Thieves have stolen more than 38,000 feet, or seven miles, of copper wire from the bridge, causing $2.5 million in damage, according to Mark González, the local assemblymember who represents the area.
“We have multiple incidents just in our areas each day. It adds up,” the undercover LASD detective said, adding that construction sites in LA, where homes are being rebuilt after January’s Palisades and Eaton wildfires claimed more than 16,000 homes and structures, are frequent targets for thieves.
It’s very hard to trace stolen bare copper, the detective told CNN. While some telecom companies use colored paper coating to help identify their wires, city wiring is less easily identifiable. Any fix would be expensive for the city.
“For now, it’s kind of the Wild West,” the detective added.
The Sixth Street Bridge isn’t an isolated case. As copper prices climb, streetlight outages have become a persistent problem across Los Angeles. Theft- and vandalism-related outages increased tenfold between 2017 and 2022, according to the city’s Bureau of Street Lighting.
In a statement to CNN, a spokesperson for Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass called copper wire t