Concord Council to Hear Presentation on Copper Wire Theft

Since 2007, the Concord has experienced a significant increase in the incidents of copper wire theft and damage to electrical pull boxes that house copper wire for streetlights, parks lighting and irrigation control systems. These incidents have cost the City almost $400,000 in replacement and repair costs.

The Concord City Council will hear a presentation by Interim Public Works Director Mike Miller on this issue at its meeting on Tuesday, May 1, beginning at 6:30 p.m. in the City Council Chambers at Civic Center, 1950 Parkside Drive. The presentation will include a plea to the public to assist the City in stopping the thieves who damage City and private property.

"The replacement costs for copper wire theft and related repairs as a result of vandalism were not a significant issue in the past ten years and, therefore, not projected in past budgets," said Miller. "As the value of copper wire has increased, incidents of copper wire theft has increased substantially. This is not just a City of Concord phenomenon; it has become a problem nationwide."

Wire theft is one of the major contributing factors to the growing backlog of service requests to repair streetlights and park lights. Although numerous efforts have been made to make it harder for the thieves to access the wire, many locations have been hit five to seven times, giving the public the impression that no repairs have been completed.

The public is welcome to attend the meeting to hear the presentation or view the meeting broadcast on Concord cable TV channel 28 (Comcast), channel 29 (Astound) and AT&T U-verse channel 99.

Philips Lumileds Lighting, San Jose, Calif., has been assigned a patent developed by Walter Daschner, Half Moon Bay, Calif., Xina Quan, Saratoga, Calif., and Nanze P. Wang, San Jose, Calif., for a "multiple die LED and lens optical system."

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: "A light emitting device includes a number of light emitting diode dies (LEDs) mounted on a shared submount and covered with a single lens element that includes a corresponding number of lens elements. The LEDs are separated from each other by a distance that is sufficient for lens element to include separate lens elements for each LED. The separation of the LEDs and lens elements may be configured to produce a desired amount of light on a target at a predefined distance. In one embodiment, the lens elements are approximately flat type lens elements, such as Fresnel, TIR, diffractive lens, photonic crystal type lenses, prism, or reflective lens."