Copper thieves struck a cable vault in Los Angeles, California, earlier this year, taking down services for thousands of residents in the area. The news was revealed after California's governor, Gavin Newsom, signed a new bill to crack down on copper wire theft.

ABC reports that cable thieves broke into a Los Angeles cable vault in January, knocking out services for “thousands” of people in the south of the city.

"Thirty-two cables were cut that night," Charles Berry, an associate director of construction and engineering at AT&T, told ABC. "Eighty percent of the area that the customers [were] fed [from] was out of service. It's pretty painful to know there are families, hospitals, offices, things of that nature, 911, not working because of theft like this."

A 1,600-pound plate and manhole were lifted and removed in order to access the vault. AT&T is now reportedly welding and bolting manholes down to make it harder to move them, with some even being filled with concrete.

Between June and December 2024, the US telecommunications industry experienced nearly 6,000 reported incidents of copper theft and infrastructure vandalism nationwide.

AT&T plans to retire its copper network by 2029, amid the company's major fiber build-out across the US. In the meantime, however, many services still rely on the legacy technology. AT&T told DCD earlier in the year that it spends $6 billion annually to keep its copper services running, a figure that it wants to cut down and invest in future technologies.

AT&T said that from January to June of this year, Los Angeles alone reported a total of 1,502 copper theft incidents, the highest number of incidents in the country. The city with the second-highest number of incidents, St. Louis, had 483 during the same period.

ABC and AT&T visited a junkyard, finding a manhole and recently burned conduit cable in the street near the site.

This month saw California Governor Gavin Newsom sign a new bill into law designed to crack down on copper wire theft. The bill requires junk dealers and recyclers to collect detailed records on sellers, and makes scrap metal from “essential infrastructure” illegal to possess without documentation.

Susan Santana, president of AT&T California-Nevada, said that in Los Angeles alone, the company has more than 200 techs working on repairing and replacing copper just in one community.

“We'd much rather be building out fiber, building out 5G, connecting the unserved to the Internet, but that's not possible when all these resources are being sucked into this problem,” she said.

AT&T offers rewards of up to $20,000 for tips that lead to the arrest and conviction of those involved in copper cable theft.

Earlier this month, $50,000 in copper wire stolen from a telephone pole in the Mission Hills area of Los Angeles was recovered. The theft impacted Frontier and AT&T customers. Two suspects have been charged with grand theft.

DCD covered the issue of theft of telecoms infrastructure in the latest issue of DCD>Magazine. Read about it here.