Nearly 3,000 homes in southern Warren County lost power Friday night due to vandalism and a burglary at Warren Rural Electric Cooperative Corp.’s substation in Plano.

After alarms sounded about 6:45 p.m., WRECC crews traveled to the site and discovered stolen copper wires, a “breached” fence and “extensive damage” to the substation.

“You’d think it’s a little copper wire, but it caused extensive damage to our substation,” said Kim Phelps, WRECC spokeswoman.

WRECC set up a temporary substation to return power to the substation’s entire service area by 3 a.m. Saturday, but “it will take days of testing to even know the extent of the damage to the existing station,” Phelps said.

Substation repairs will likely be expensive for WRECC – often costing utilities several thousand dollars or more, depending on the size of the substation and the amount of copper wire stolen, according to other recent reports around the country – and the repair process could be dangerous for their employees.

“Anytime you’re working with high-voltage electricity, it’s dangerous,” Phelps said.

Substations operate by reducing high-voltage electricity (between tens or hundreds of thousands of volts) traveling across larger transmission lines from power sources and then sending the lower-voltage electricity through small power lines to homes and businesses.

“I want the public to know how dangerous substations are,” Phelps said. “Going into a substation is just crazy.”

This is the first major nonweather outage this year, and the first case of copper wire theft in recent memory, according to Phelps.

Copper theft remains an issue for communities across the globe due to its still relatively high price per pound. And it was once considered an “epidemic,” with copper theft rings strategically attacking utilities, railroads and businesses following a copper price spike in 2004, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

DOE estimated in 2014 that metal theft and resulting power outages, revenue losses and repairs cost businesses about $1 billion annually.

There were a total of 27,514 claims for the theft of copper, aluminum, brass and bronze submitted to a property claims database, ISO ClaimSearch, between Jan. 1, 2014, and March 31, 2018, according to the National Insurance Crime Bureau.

The Warren County Sheriff’s Office is investigating the vandalism and burglary.

“I would like to thank our employees for their hard work and dedication. Repairing damage to a substation, especially damage at the level we experienced, is difficult and time consuming. I would also like to thank the Warren County Sheriff’s Office for their quick response,” Dewayne McDonald, interim president and CEO of Warren RECC, said in a news release.

If anyone has any information relating to the incident, WRECC is asking people to contact the Warren County Sheriff’s Office at 270-842-1633.