Thieves hunting for scrap metal in Kingwood turned a little-known piece of plumbing into a big mess, flooding a strip center, disrupting five healthcare businesses and sticking the landlord with an estimated $4,000 to $5,000 in repairs.
Overnight Tuesday, surveillance video captured a man in a hoodie and a woman pulling up to a strip center on Kingwood Executive Drive, prying open a metal cage and yanking out a backflow preventer, according to Click2Houston. Property manager Lyn Rathgeber told the outlet that once the device was gone, water poured uncontrolled from a broken two-inch pipe for roughly seven hours, adding a bloated utility bill to the repair headache and forcing several medical tenants to limit or halt operations.
Backflow preventers are not just random hunks of brass sitting by a parking lot. A City of Houston Municipal Courts code listing identifies them as part of the city’s potable water system and bars anyone from removing one without authorization, a nod to their job keeping contaminated water from backing into drinking supplies.
A Repeat Target With A Lopsided Payout
The Kingwood property is no stranger to this kind of hit. It has been targeted three times now, once in 2024 and again in May, along with separate copper thefts, Click2Houston reported. About three miles away, Swamp Donkeys recently lost its own backflow preventer, with a similar spray of water caught on camera after last week’s theft.
The math on these crimes is brutally uneven. Thieves typically get only a small payout from selling the brass for scrap, while business owners eat the cost of specialized replacement parts, plumbing work, sky-high water usage, temporary closures and damage to connected pipes and landscaping.
The pattern is not unique to Kingwood. In San Antonio this spring, KSAT reported that a man was accused of repeatedly sawing off brass backflow preventers around the City Base area and selling the metal to a salvage yard.
Police Want Tips, Not Heroics
Houston police are asking anyone who recognizes the suspects in the Kingwood surveillance footage to contact authorities and not confront them. The Houston Police Department lists its non-emergency number as 713-884-3131, and its Kingwood station can be reached at 832-395-1800.
