SEATTLE — Employees at Sea-Pac Transportation Services LLC arrived to work on June 12 to find their phone lines were down. Three weeks later, they still don't have service.
"We rely heavily on those phones to get containers to be shipped, exported, imported into the country, out of the country. We're talking millions of dollars being lost on a daily basis," George, an operations manager for the company, said. He asked KING 5 to not use his last name for privacy reasons.
"When Century link sent their representative out to go ahead and look at our phone lines, they notified us someone had actually stolen all the phone lines and copper along with the fiber optic cables," he said. "They also let us know that it had effected 900 businesses in the area of West Seattle and that's unfathomable. That's insane."
After waiting a few weeks, George shared what was happening on Reddit. KING 5 reached out to CenturyLink about this situation. A spokesperson said on June 29 that they are "still looking into these reports of an outage affecting customers in the West Seattle area. Our techs are investigating the issue now."
CenturyLink did not respond to requests for an update at the time of this article's publishing.
George said CenturyLink told his company they anticipated repairing the phone lines by July 10. He said it's the third date they've been given.
According to George, Seattle Police told him they arrested the man responsible for causing their phone lines to be down. Seattle police did not respond to a request for more information.
Preventing copper thefts
Despite the buying and selling of metal being regulated, there continues to be a market for stolen metal. Months ago, KING 5 reported on the issue EV drivers were having because of thieves cutting chargers to steal the copper. A recent GeekWire article highlighted how the problem has worsened.
Jonathan Howe, owner of West Seattle Recycling, said any reputable business works hard to avoid buying stolen metal.
"We look at IDs, cash-limit, knowing your customers, asking questions, checking what's reported stolen. We have a thing called scraptheftalert.com and we check that every day. We're on the lookout for any high profile thefts," he said. "We always ask questions about where they got it from and if they don't give us the right answer, we turn it away."
Howe said he encourages people to report all metal thefts to police and scraptheftalert.com so there's a paper trail. If police ask him for customer records to help solve a crime, he immediately turns them over.
"I've been in the business for 40 years and I'm near the end of my career. I don't need that career tarnished," Howe said. "I want to leave a legacy that's honest."
George said his company uses West Seattle Recycling often and can attest to the stringent measures they take to ensure they're not buying stolen metal.