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WEST JORDAN — Rocky Mountain Power officials are investigating a copper theft from a West Jordan substation. Crews had to turn off power to hundreds of customers to repair damage from the break-in.
It happened at the South Park Substation sometime overnight Sunday into Monday, according to company spokesman Dave Eskelsen.
"Stealing copper from a substation is extremely risky,” he said. “It risks injury and death when people get in there. It also puts power reliability at risk."
The crime was discovered Monday morning. Crews had to turn off the power to 948 customers for about 45 minutes to make repairs.
"In this case the theft itself did not cause the outage, but it did expose our customers later to a certain amount of inconvenience," Eskelsen said.
"We are cooperating with authorities in investigating this. This does happen from time-to-time, and we work with authorities on prosecuting individuals who do this," Eskelsen said.
Stealing copper from a substation is extremely risky.
–Dave Eskelsen
He said it's a persistent problem due to the price of copper.
More repair to the substation is needed but it should not require another power outage, Eskelsen said.
