Power Bandits

Photographs by Nick Martines

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In overgrown, trash-lined alleys all over Detroit — even in upscale West Bloomfield Township, and as far away as the Upper Peninsula — a potentially lethal and expensive cat-and-mouse game is playing out every day at a steep cost to residents and businesses.

The battle, so far, is a mismatch. A team of 80 investigators and technicians from DTE Energy are up against hundreds of state property owners and landlords — and desperately poor Detroiters — who are stealing more than $100 million worth of electrical power and natural gas each year, according to company officials.

Everyone who pays their utility bill is a victim, as DTE Energy passes on the losses to ratepayers. “The incidents of theft are much higher in Detroit,” says DTE spokesman Scott Simons. “Ninety percent of the theft cases are in the city of Detroit. It’s [happening] all throughout the city, in pockets of poverty.”   

The racket is shockingly crude and simple. Coat hangers, referred to as fish hooks by investigators, are attached to extension cords and thrown over power lines humming with as much as 13,200 volts of electricity. The cords are strung across back yards, sometimes dangling from tree branches, carrying the hijacked electricity into homes and buildings.

The heist of electricity also is made at the meter box. Typically, a glass cover is smashed, the metering device removed, and pieces of metal that can conduct electricity — often spoons, knives, or forks — are wedged between contact points to complete the bypass. The end result: Unmetered power flows unabated.

Natural gas is another resource targeted by criminals. In many cases, thieves dig man-sized holes in front of vacant homes or buildings to tap an incoming gas line. Once the line is found, a bypass is fashioned using a car’s radiator hose or PVC pipe. A more sophisticated approach, often seen in commercial buildings, happens when meters are rigged to record a fraction of the energy consumed.

Across the country, utility companies are reporting rising incidents of energy theft that, they say, reflect the nation’s economic downturn.

According to Electric Light & Power magazine, the theft of power by customers costs utilities 1 percent to 3 percent of revenue annually, or about $6 billion industrywide each year.   

“We get 2,000-plus new leads every week,” says Mark Johnson, DTE’s general manager for energy theft investigations. “The main way we find them, though, is through our meter readers who go to every house once a month. If they see something abnormal, they flag it and send it to us.”

As the epidemic of energy theft has soared in recent years, DTE has stepped up its response team. Of 80 people involved, a third serve as investigators; the rest disconnect illegal hookups.

“Last year we turned off 62,000 (rigged meters), and we investigated over 100,000,” Johnson says. “The year before, we turned off over 40,000.”

He concedes the increase in disconnections is partly due to DTE’s larger investigative team.

Probably the most surprising aspect of energy theft is that more people aren’t being electrocuted.  “Kids could touch the lines hanging off the poles and get hurt,” Johnson says. And once the cold weather sets in, temperature fluctuations increase the likelihood of a natural gas explosion.

Since 2005, half a dozen people have been found electrocuted at the base of utility poles, although it’s not clear whether they were killed stealing electricity or stripping copper from transformers. Copper theft, which hit epidemic proportions a couple of years ago, creates another major loss for DTE.

Natural gas explosions, although rare, do occur. On July 8, a vacant house in southwest Detroit blew up after neighbors had complained of strong odors of natural gas permeating the area. Months earlier, DTE had disconnected the service at the request of an occupant. The house exploded because natural gas built up inside, says DTE spokesman John Austerberry. “It was clear that someone had tampered with the service.

Fortunately, no one was hurt or injured [because] the house was empty,” he says.
In May, another natural gas explosion rocked a vacant duplex on Detroit’s east side. Someone had stolen the one remaining hot water heater from the basement and left a gas line valve open, allowing gas to build up.

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