Comment: ‘Wire’ thieves are cutting residents from vital services
Published 1:30 am Saturday, March 14, 2026
By David Ducharme / For The Herald
Imagine heading out early to take Sound Transit’s light rail to a parade in downtown Seattle celebrating the Seahawks’ Super Bowl LX victory only to find out that metal thieves shut down the entire system between SeaTac and Federal Way.
Unfortunately, that happened. Fortunately however, Sound Transit was prepared for this type of disruption due to increasing attacks on its infrastructure and was able to get the trains back and running with minimal inconvenience to the thousands of passengers relying on public transit to get them to the party.
Critical infrastructure in our state is under siege, from brazen metal thieves to vandals targeting the networks that keep our state running. These attacks aren’t rare anymore; they’re routine, and they’re hitting the core systems that support first responders, transportation, electric utilities, and public safety. It’s past time for the law to catch up.
Enter Senate Bill 6190, and its companion, House Bill 2629, which could have lifted scrap‑metal regulations into the 21st century and acknowledged that fiber‑optic cable is not, in fact, copper, no matter how confused thieves seem to be about the difference. The damage caused when someone slices through fiber isn’t just an inconvenience; it’s catastrophic. It brings 911 and 988 outages, and leaves emergency responders flying blind, businesses grinding to a halt, schools shutting down and whole communities effectively disconnected from help. High‑impact crime deserves high‑impact consequences.
That’s what these bills offered by creating new civil and criminal penalties for intentional destruction of the critical infrastructure we rely on every day.
The bills would have finally given law enforcement, utilities, and local governments the tools they’ve needed for years; tools designed for a world where a single cut cable can disrupt an entire region in seconds. They weren’t punitive toward legitimate recyclers and weren’t regulatory overreach. They were commonsense accountability approaches targeted at people who knowingly sabotage essential public systems.
Washington is investing heavily in broadband expansion, transportation electrification, and modern utility networks. But progress means nothing if we can’t protect the systems that make it possible.
SB 6190 and HB 2629 were the right bills at the right moment. In the end, SB 6190 was the bill selected for passage. Unfortunately, the Legislature missed it by letting the clock run out on a critical deadline resulting in the bill being lost for this legislative session. Washington’s critical infrastructure deserves more than patchwork fixes. It deserves protection with real teeth. And it deserves it now.
David Ducharme is executive director of the Broadband Communication Association of Washington.
