Okla. city turns to risky fix to repair lights

Tulsa has lost 33 miles of streetlight wiring to copper thieves

TULSA, Okla. — For years, residents in this cash-strapped city watched helplessly as thieves gutted 33 miles of streetlight wiring, plunging long stretches of roadway into darkness. The thousands of dollars criminals pocketed at off-thebooks salvage yards wreaked millions of dollars in damage.

Now Tulsa is scrambling to make patchwork repairs to its decimated grid, opting for a quick fix to appease frustrated motorists, including 48-yearold resident Bill White, who says broken streetlights could become a liability for the city and a hazard for drivers, not to mention an eyesore.

“If I’m visiting the city from the airport, what’s going to be my first impression?” White said. “Am I still in the country?”

Copper thieves have pillaged lighting grids in cities large and small across the nation, causing municipal budgets to skyrocket. Law enforcement agencies estimated that the copper theft racket was costing cities $1 billion a year. At peak demand, copper went for around $4 per pound; it fetches about half that now. Scrap aluminum hovers around 40 cents.

The lighting dilemma in Tulsa also tells the larger story of the country’s deteriorating infrastructure due to decades of neglect, deferred maintenance and unwillingness by officials to make tough funding decisions. Many bridges and overpasses are obsolete; roads are pocked with potholes; sewer systems are time bombs. Some federal officials estimated it would take about $1 trillion to fix the mess.

“Tulsa has the problem that almost every city in the country has: Their maintenance costs are outside what they can afford, so they’re making piecemeal repairs just because of the cash flow,” said Sean Crotty, an assistant professor of geography at Texas Christian University.

“Just the pole itself on a highway is a shocking, expensive thing: $60,000 per post,” said Crotty, who’s also a faculty member in the university’s Center for Urban Studies.

In an effort to switch most of the lights back on by December, the city is using cheaper, less-durable aluminum wiring instead of more reliable copper and gambling that theft-deterrent doors and stickers affixed to light poles exclaiming in English and Spanish, “We Use Aluminum Wire” will be enough to thwart would-be criminals.

But what the state’s secondlargest city is looking to save for the sake of convenience and immediacy could end up throwing its streetlight grid into chaos again, city officials and urban designers say.

“Even with aluminum, really, as long as these materials remain valuable, there’s no magic bullet,” said Terry Ball, the director of Tulsa’s streets and storm water department, which began tracking the thefts in 2014. “There’s no one approach you can take.”