Unfortunately in some parts you deal with the theft and vandalism. Acquaintance of mine deals with this a lot in Arizona on mountain tops. Sometimes folks steal

Unfortunately in some parts you deal with the theft and vandalism. Acquaintance of mine deals with this a lot in Arizona on mountain tops. Sometimes folks stealing gear and selling it on eBay for whatever they can get. Back in the 90s and early 2000s the theft of copper was getting pretty bad in some parts of the country/rural areas. Folks could spot an outage and guess it was due to vandals but they could never catch them. Lots of metal yards would look the other way and buy it no question asked, but it was difficult to prove folks stole it. So they would get in a helo with a FLIR camera and cruise the country side looking for heat blooms and be in contact with the NOC for any outages popping up. They'd eventually find folks using a 55 gallon drum with a fire where they'd pull the copper over it to melt off the cover and call in the sheriff to go after them.