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These days, the temperature inside the kitchen at Sweet Red Peach bakery is at least 93 degrees. Danny Griffin, the franchise co-owner of the location, and his employees swelter in the back of the Pasadena shop as they race to ice cakes, cinnamon rolls and other baked goods before the frosting all melts away.
The brutal heat and intense working conditions inside the kitchen and the front area of the business come after a thief wrecked the rooftop air conditioning unit in search of copper wiring. Griffin says he’s had no choice but to stay open during this time, despite the heat risks to himself and employees as the hottest temperatures of the year so far bake Southern California.
“We got to be here in order to stay open. If not, we’d close,” Griffin said in an interview with The Times on Tuesday. The loss of the AC is “impacting us greatly,” he added.
Griffin and the bakery workers first realized something was wrong when it got abnormally hot in their kitchen last Tuesday.
“We wouldn’t want to subject ourselves to anything like this. It’s not safe,” he said. “It’s like working outside.”
Since the beginning of the year, there have been a total of six rooftop air conditioning units at Pasadena businesses robbed of their copper-wire components, Pasadena Police Lt. Monica Cuellar told The Times. Two of them occurred in the last several days.
It’s a change of tactics for thieves in the city, according to Pasadena spokesperson Lisa Derdarian; before the string of rooftop thefts, incidents of copper wire being taken by thieves were almost entirely limited to what was accessible at street level.
The rooftop thefts are a newer trend in the Pasadena area and have amounted to more damage than what the copper material is worth, Cuellar said.
Yet the city has warned businesses with rooftop AC systems that the units are vulnerable to copper wire thieves because “they are out of sight and [are] often situated on flat, easily scalable commercial buildings.”
The latest burglaries occurred in the early morning of July 11 at the Petsadena Animal Hospital on South Raymond Avenue and overnight on July 13 at the bakery at a strip mall on Arroyo Parkway. The city said it’s not yet clear whether the two thefts are related.
The pet hospital lost one of two AC units, meaning the facility is able to keep animals in its care and their human clients comfortable. But staff members have had to make do with indoor swamp coolers and fans, said Darlene Lopez, the manager at the animal hospital, in an interview with The Times.
The situation “really put up additional hurdles in the hospital’s way,” Lopez said, which includes daily runs to the store for ice and the purchase of a freezer.
“This is the first time something like this has happened,” she added.
The thefts mean the loss of thousands of dollars for each of these businesses, such as added operational costs, fees racked up for inspections of the AC units to determine the damage, and eventual replacement costs. At Sweet Red Peach bakery, replacing the HVAC unit could cost franchise owner Griffin as much as $25,000, he told The Times.
But, beyond the concerns about the future of the business and the daunting costs of the AC unit, Griffin emphasized the importance of community during a challenging time. He said that an owner of a sandwich shop in Gardena bought out his entire stock on Sunday and told him “to go home.” Others, including businesses within the same strip mall, donated portable swamp coolers.
“People have been supporting us. It’s been amazing,” Griffin said of the last week. Some came in to show their support after seeing segments on the local news about the current situation at the bakery.
Prior to the string of air conditioner copper wire thefts, Pasadena experienced several periods over the last two years of rampant copper wire theft from streetlights and traffic lights, costing the city $87,000 in lost equipment and $200,000 for emergency repairs, Derdarian told The Times. At a city Department of Water and Power stockyard last year, $55,000 in copper wire equipment was stolen, she added.
The city found an effective deterrent for thefts at streetlights and other locations. It sealed the vaults that house the copper wire with a “special glue,” Derdarian said, which has reduced the number of additional thefts.
She said the onus is on the landlords and owners of these commercial spaces to take action to protect rooftop AC units.
The city is recommending “tamper-resistant steel cages around the units,” locking all exterior ladders and setting up motion-activated security cameras that would immediately notify business owners or landlords about unauthorized rooftop activity.
For Griffin, even as community support and public awareness have grown, the health risks and business challenges are getting worse as time goes on and the air conditioning remains inoperable. Extreme heat in the kitchen, he said, is affecting the bakery’s ability to produce its goods.
“That’s hurting sales because some people don’t get what they want and they leave,” Griffin said.
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
