They are stealing them to take to the scrapyard there is some kind of metal in them that they get money for. They just had news story about this in Mobile, AL. The thieves pull up in big parking lots at night with a battery powered sawzall and go to hacking. The same thing goes for copper in air conditioners they're hacking those up to. There was another news story about some guy that went into a vacant house to steal the wire but the power was still on and fried him up, I don't know if he died because I missed it from laughing to hard.