WA’s 1200-kilometre trail of stolen copper cable could stretch from Perth to Exmouth
Widespread outages in Perth's road network have been attributed to the theft of copper cables. Over the past eight years, approximately 1200 kilometers of cable have been stolen, prompting Main Roads to implement theft mitigation measures. The recent WA budget has allocated $11.8 million to replace the stolen cables and enhance security along key highways.
- ▪Main Roads reported that 1200 kilometers of copper cable have been stolen since 2019.
- ▪In the 2023-24 financial year, Main Roads lost about 297 kilometers of copper cable to theft.
- ▪The WA budget has allocated $11.8 million to replace stolen cables and implement anti-theft measures.
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| Original publisher | The Sydney Morning Herald |
| Canonical URL | https://www.smh.com.au/national/western-australia/wa-s-1200-kilometre-trail-of-stolen-copper-cable-could-stretch-from-perth-to-exmouth-20260514-p5zx30.html?ref=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_source=rss_feed |
| Publication time | Tue, 19 May 2026 05:00:00 +1000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-18T19:04:56.969Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-18T19:04:56.969Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | tU3sPo44tnNF |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","dateModified":"2026-05-18T19:00:00Z","datePublished":"2026-05-18T19:00:00Z","description":"Main Roads has revealed widespread outages are often linked to stolen copper cables. Here’s what it intends to do about it.","headline":"WA’s 1200-kilometre trail of stolen copper cable could stretch from Perth to Exmouth","keywords":"Crime, Roads, Perth, Roads, Just in WA, Power network","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Holly Thompson","jobTitle":"Journalist","url":"/by/holly-thompson-p535wg"},{"@type":"Person","name":"Hamish…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Sydney Morning Herald.