• On Jan. 30, a residence being demolished at 382 Central Ave. in Lewiston had copper pipe stolen from inside;

• On several occasions during the week of Jan. 7, a vacant home on Old Webster Road in Lewiston was burglarized and stripped of copper pipe from the basement;

• On Jan. 24, hospital staff caught a South Portland man stealing copper wire from Maine Medical Center; and

• In December, thieves stole 21,000 feet of copper from street lights along the East End Trail in Portland. Their haul weighed more than 10 tons.

This is just a sampling of recent events. We could go back further, and cite the Rumford resident who had $10,000 in copper stolen from his home, the empty buildings on Holland and Ash streets in Lewiston with their copper piping stripped, or the poor soul nabbed by police snipping copper wire from telephone poles.

This past Thursday, world copper prices reached another 90-day high, at about $7,300 per ton. The metal’s rapid appreciation has been the catalyst behind rampant copper thefts, which are plaguing electrical substations, buildings and businesses nationwide.

Rep. Seth Berry, D-Bowdoinham, has submitted a bill to the Maine Legislature to crack down upon this illegal trade. Berry’s legislation would mandate scrap metal dealers to record transactions of more than $50 or 100 pounds, and have sellers proffering metals to show identification and swear their legal ownership of the materials.

From there, it’s believed, police could track stolen metals back to the thieves. The bill codifies what should be practice among dealers anyway, and what many dealers are already doing. It’s a sensible and needed approach.

It’s about all, as well, Augusta can do about this problem.

Copper thefts are crimes of opportunity and neglect – the sites are empty buildings, open construction sites, exposed telephone polls and remote electrical substations.

There are no copper robbers. When sneaky thieves steal copper, it can take weeks to notice. Even the massive Portland theft went unnoticed long enough to have the snipped wire ends become tarnished.

This makes metal theft a near-perfect crime, except when things go wrong, and collateral damage occurs. Some burglars have died, or cut electrical power, burglarizing substations. The December 2006 fire in downtown Lewiston, started as cover for copper thefts, is another grave reminder about stopping these crimes before they occur.

The primary responsibility for this falls upon property owners, contractors, electrical companies and municipalities – those with accessible and unguarded copper supplies – to develop plans to secure their stores from thieves.

Berry’s bill deserves support, but it can only help solve crimes, long after they occur.