A GANG of copper thieves could have blacked out the whole city when they stole cabling from an electricity substation.

It emerged yesterday just how close it came to hundreds of thousands of homes across the country being plunged into darkness.

The gang of Romanian men took their lives in their hands as they broke into the 400,000-volt National Grid compound in Blackberry Lane, near Greater Leys in Oxford, to steal 215 metres of copper “earth tape”, which acts as a crucial safety device.

The men, many of whom have similar previous convictions, were captured with the help of police dogs and a helicopter fitted with a thermal-imaging camera.

Nicolae-ionut Floricel, Vasile Preda, Stefan Preda, Vasile Filisan, Nita Baicu, Mariam Tanase, Mihani Cirstea and Florin Constantin, all from the West Midlands, were jailed for between 18 months and two years each at Oxford Crown Court yesterday.

Quoting a report from Les Snowdon of the National Grid, prosecutor Nikki Duncan said the crime had “potential to cause loss of electricity to hundreds of thousands of people”.

She said without copper earth tape to safely dissipate electrical surges into the ground there “could be a failure and on-site explosion”.

Continuing to quote from Mr Snowdon’s report, Miss Duncan added: “Normal operation of the substation was curtailed.

“It could have affected the whole of Oxford, including the three hospitals, and it could have had an impact on the wider network including Gloucester and South Wales.”

Seven of the gang – Floricel, 26, Vasile Preda, 20, Stefan Preda, 27, Filisan, 25, Baicu, 21, Tanase, 22, and Mihani Cirstea, 22, – lived at addresses in Vicarge Road, Oldbury. Constantin, 22, was from Richmond Hill, Oldbury.

They used a rope ladder to climb over the compound’s electric fence and spent up to three hours cutting and piling the copper in the early hours of April 1.

The metal was valued at £8,052 but cost £16,200 to replace, in addition to £2,000 of repairs.

Timothy Boswell, defending Floricel and Cirstea, said: “It doesn’t appear that any of the defendants were aware of the dangers they were running in removing the copper strip.”

Four of the men worked as car washers and one of them, 25-year-old Filisan, had only been in Britain for two weeks before committing the offence.

John Waller, defending him, said: “He has extremely serious burns to one side of his body caused by a water heater exploding when he was in Romania.

“He was told by doctors that he required a skin graft costing upwards of €6,000 (£4,855).

“He heard from friends that if he would go and work in the UK there’s a chance the treatment would be paid for by the NHS.”

Judge Gordon Risius said: “There’s great public concern about the rate at which metal is currently being stolen to sell on as scrap. Where, as in this case, the metal was intended to safeguard people’s lives, such concern can only increase.”

HIGH VALUE

Copper prices peaked in February 2011 at US$463.10 per pound. They had been as low as US$4.73 a pound in October 1931 but over the past seven years the price has seen the steepest increases. The soaring prices are chiefly attributed to China’s economic growth. Annual copper demand in Asia is roughly double that of Europe and North America combined. Chile is the world’s greatest supplier of the metal, producing about a fifth of all supplies.