Oddly Enough - Reuters
Hold the Phone! Copper Wire Theft Soars
Tue Sep 24, 7:43 AM ET
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (Reuters) - Half a million Argentines have been robbed of phone service in 2002 amid the nation's worst-ever crisis as thieves have stolen 500 tons of copper wire, one phone company said on Monday.
The local unit of Spain's Telefonica said 125,000 miles of its copper wires -- a distance equal to five times the circumference of the planet or 16 times Earth's diameter -- have been stolen so far this year.
"The theft of wires, a long-standing problem in this country, has been on a growing and irreversible trend," Telefonica said in a statement.
"At the start of 2002, what was an occasional and controllable problem has become a massive and structural one, putting at serious risk the continuity of service," it added.
Utility firms said service outages have multiplied in 2002 as scrap-metal scavengers strip phone lines, transformers and electric wires in and around Buenos Aires as well as the Andean city of Mendoza and deep in sparsely populated Patagonia.
One newspaper last month reported $195 million-worth of copper has been exported in the first half of 2002, when Argentina has never before exported the base metal.
A recession in Argentina since mid-1998 forced the government to default on part of its $104 billion debt and devalue the peso currency in January, leading many people to take drastic measures to make ends meet.
With half of Argentina's 36 million people unable to meet basic food needs and one-fifth of the work force out of a job, some have sold their hair to a wig factory while one woman placed an ad to sell her kidney to pay for her mother's health care.
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