Richmond businesses turn copper theft outage into community barbecue
12 businesses shut down for three days by theft; owner pays for celebration that sparked unexpected friendships.
The day's top stories, food & events — every morning at 7. Unsubscribe anytime.
When thieves broke into the electrical room at the back of a building at Riverside Industrial Park on Wednesday evening, June 3, and stripped all the copper wiring, they shut down 12 of the complex's 24 business units—seafood and meat companies, tech firms, service providers—for three full business days. The copper they got was worth about $40. The damage: immeasurable. But what came after transformed a disaster into a neighborhood story.
Stacey Friedman, owner of SOS Tech, watched the power drain away, along with three days of lost business. "It was about $40 worth of copper. That's all they got and this is the damage they've done to 12 businesses," she told Richmond News.
Rather than stewing in the dark, Jeff Jiang, owner of JPC Services, organized an impromptu two-hour barbecue in the parking lot. He paid for the whole thing and brought in a chef from Chuan Ku BBQ Restaurant to cater.
"Money is not the issue," Jiang said. "I like to do things to make all the people in the neighbourhood happy and turn a very bad situation into a good one. People tend to just barbecue hotdogs and hamburgers, but I wanted to make it a real barbecue."
The event fed more than 50 people—business owners, landscaping crews, UPS drivers passing through. And something unexpected happened.
"We've been doing business for 18 years and I've never known the people working here," Jiang said. "We don't really know each other. It went from everybody being frustrated to suddenly having a party."
Friedman echoed that shift. "We pulled together and we were all talking about how we're so busy working side by side—none of us really knew each other. Now we all know each other. It's actually been a little bit of fun."
BC Hydro electricians had to rebuild the electrical system before reconnecting power. Friedman said many owners were sitting outside on chairs, answering client calls on their cell phones, when Jiang's barbecue began. What could have been a bitter loss became a rare moment of spontaneous community.
It's a small story about a small loss, but it says something true about how crisis can expose either fracture or resilience—and sometimes it just depends on one person deciding to turn it around.