Copper thieves target landline in Wilmot Township, customers without phone service

Residents in Wellesley, Wilmot Township, and Perth County are without working home phones and other services, after copper thieves targeted a nearby phone line on Thursday.

Waterloo Regional Police say they received reports of property damage to a Bell box in the area of Lisbon Road and Nafziger Road in Wilmot Township.

The cable hangs above the Nith River, but on Friday all that remained was a downed telephone pole, scrap metal, and a single cable laying across the frozen river.

Bell, which is the parent company of CTV News, attributes the service interruption to someone stealing the phone line for the copper wire inside.

“Bell has experience more than 1,600 security incidents to its network since January 2022, with copper theft accounting for 87 per cent of physical incidents on Bell’s network,” a Bell spokesperson told CTV News.

Police say 122 thefts related to wire, metal, or scrap were reported in 2023, and165 reported thefts last year.

Const. Melissa Quarrie said these instances tend to happen in rural areas.

“Rural damages often go unnoticed for longer periods of time just due to the remoteness of them,” Const. Quarrie said.

Bell didn’t confirm how many customers were affected but expect to have service up and running by the end of Saturday.

Bruce Lindner, a poultry farmer in Perth County, says this is the second time service has been interrupted this month, after a landline was cut less than two weeks ago.

Lindner relies on an alert monitoring system to oversee more than 28,000 chickens on his property.

“A fan may go down because a breaker may trip,” Lindner said. “Normally it would call me and tell me that it’s getting a little warm, but if it didn’t the bird may suffocate and die.”

The system relies on Bell phonelines to stay online. Lindner plans to switch to fiber optics to ensure this issue doesn’t happen again.

In the meantime, he has to stay close to the farm to constantly monitor his poultry.

“At night [you] wake up and you think ‘I hope everything’s alright’, because you don’t for sure know.”

Police said they aren’t currently investigating the incident, due to a lack of suspects and no knowing exactly when the damage happened.