AzCal: We had five hydro's in our service area, I would only go there to service their power equipment but on one visit a work crew from GE was servicing one of the generators, we got to talking and he showed me the original build tag, the thing had been installed in 1917, and needed only minor maintenance work, that was probably around 1998 or so. Back then guys knew how to build stuff that lasted. A lot of the gauges and switches in those plants were original as well.
Sounds like we worked for the same outfit
No matter how our crew shaped up there was always one asshole that called in sick every Friday. Shirked overtime and storm duty, and just couldn't give you a decent days work. Normally we were expected to do about 6 hours of work in an 8.5 hour day. If everyone pulled their weight we could get everything done and be cleaned up in an easy 5 or so hours. When someone screwed off it meant the rest of us sweated it out for the full eight.
As to copper theft, early on the company let us keep all the scrap copper and iron. Once a year we'd sell it to the local scrap yard and have a "copper party." Then one of the higher ups figured out what the stuff was worth and we had to turn it in and the company sold it off. In some locations we had a huge problem with theft, at our work center someone broke in, Loaded a pick up truck with scrap and drove it through the fence. He got it stuck in a field where we found it the next day. We also had a couple of instances where guys tried to steal copper that was still energized. That always made the news in a big way, I recall one of the lucky ones lost both arms. The others, their stealing days ended right then and there.
It's also a huge problem in NYC, thieves there strip the flashing off roofs and from around the skylights in old buildings, every so often one falls through the roof and that's that. I'm surprised it's an issue in Sweden, I thought they'd eliminated all of that sort of thing
Glad to see old fashioned theft is still a thing over there.