The Dominican Republic has already exported over 288 tons of copper so far this year, which is not a bad figure considering there are no active copper mines in the country! The copper isn’t not coming from underground but rather from above ground as enterprising thieves are ravishing and stealing copper from power and telephone lines and selling it as scrap.The plunder of the power lines is causing massive black outs and entire neighborhoods are suffering without power for weeks. As well as damaging to the Dominican Economy thieves in Santo Domingo cut 1,000 feet of wire in May this year which knocked out power to a huge swath of the capital for two hours which included a hospital, a naval base and a prominent down town hotel.
As easy as it is to come by the copper, the thieves are selling it as scrap metal and the copper makes its way to China which imported 460,000 tons in the first two months of 2007 to feed its booming economy.
There has been a massive rise in the price of copper which peaked at US$4.16 a pound in May ’05 and has mostly since then stayed above US$3, this has meant a great grwoth for the copper mine owners of Chile, Bolivia, Peru and Mexico. Copper exploration is now also being looked for in the central mountain regions of the Dominican Republic.
The electrical sector is already heavily crippled as recent demonstrations and protestations in the capital have shown of last week, hospitals are dependant upon shaky antiquated generators and saddly under funded schools are refusing freely donated computers because they do not have enough electricity to run the computers on. The Dominican Republic is already loosing about half of the power it generates on a daily basis anyway due to infrastructure damage and customers who refuse to pay their monthly bills and steal the electricity instead.
Pedro Pena Rubio is the commercial director of the Dominican State Run electricity company and he said “The wire thieves in Santo Domingo are increasing the number of blackouts; they need to abandon this practice immediately”.
The nation’s capital is suffering from 12 hour blackouts and areas in the north coast especially Costambar are lucky at the moment to receive power for 8 hours a day.
The government has responded by setting up a task force to investigate the copper thieves and are also asking exporters to now legally prove where they obtained their copper scrap from in the first place.
Seems they could do with a few British “Coppers” on the case to help the Dominican police with this one…..
