Cable copper thieves hit AT&T underground vault in South Los Angeles

SOUTH LOS ANGELES (KABC) -- Welcome to the vault. The inner workings of phone service and internet for AT&T. Miles and miles of underground cables. It's a constant battle to keep this working.

"The robbers they came in through there," said Charles Berry, an associate director of construction and engineering at AT&T.

Back in January, thieves actually broke in and started cutting and stealing every cable they could. You can see the mess they left behind -- strands dangling from overhead wires.

"Hundreds, thousands," said AT&T technician Michael Houston when asked how many customers would be affected by the cut lines.

"Thirty-two cables were cut that night," said Berry."Eighty percent of this area that the customers feed were out of service. It's pretty painful to know there is families, hospitals, offices, things of that nature, 911, not working because of theft like this."

AT&T took ABC7 Investigates reporter Carlos Granda on a ride-along and showed him how the thieves broke in through a manhole that was sealed.

"This is the same thing that was over that manhole over there. So, they dug out the asphalt and they removed the metal plate. And it's 1,600 pounds so you can imagine they had serious heavy equipment to be able to do that," said Andrea Moore a director of construction and engineering at AT&T.

Now they have welded manholes and bolted them in so they can't be removed. They even filled one with concrete

"Now, Carlos, in order for them to get in here they need a jackhammer, they would need to actually jackhammer this up," said Moore.

This gives you an idea of what thieves will do to steal copper, and Southern California leads the nation. According to AT&T, from January to June of this year, Los Angeles alone reported a total of 1,502 copper theft incidents. The city with the second-highest number of incidents, St. Louis, had 483 during the same period. The main reason is that the price of copper has jumped 58% in the last five years.

"There's quite a bit of focus on the resellers, the scrap dealers and the folks who create a market for the resale of the stolen copper, so I'm interested in seeing how we can be most impactful there," said California Attorney General Rob Bonta.

ABC7 Investigates went to an area near a scrapyard and right away found a broken manhole. Houston said he didn't expect it.

"Notice they cut it to the duct, took the cable out, couldn't get the top back on, obviously, the lid, so they put two cones out like we did it," said Houston.

And just a short distance from the scrapyard ABC7 Investigates found a pile of burnt conduit cable. AT&T says this does belong to them and it still smells, so they feel this was burned just one or two days ago.

Technicians say the thefts usually occur at night and they often encounter dangerous conditions as they try to repair these lines.

"Neighborhoods like this on a scale of 1 to 10, a 10. We won't send out unless we have our safety guys with us and we also send out 4 to 5 and 6 different technicians all at the same time because it's, you can't just do it like that," said Houston, who adds it's extremely dangerous.

Just this week the governor signed a bill that will increase penalties against junk dealers and recyclers and require them to maintain records and verify sellers' identities before accepting copper.

The President of AT&T California-Nevada Susan Santana said: "Just in Los Angeles, we have over 200 techs working on repairing and replacing and then again, repairing and replacing 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."

To fight this, AT&T is offering a reward of up to $20,000 for tips that lead to the arrest and conviction of those involved in copper cable theft.