$4.60 is not an all time high for copper. Copper has been around this price for a while. It’s traded within about a 10% band for the last year. It had some fluctuations prior to that, but there hasn’t been any kind of long extended run up in price.
Some local plugs are closer to fences as they will take pretty much anything of value. Recently heard of someone taking a high end bottle of cologne or expensive bottles of wine. Whether the plug enjoys the product themselves or is able to turn them around somewhere else is more information than I want to know.
If you get lucky you can pull out hundreds of feet of wire, the wire is in conduit that goes from pole to pole and it’s usually decent sized wire to account for voltage drop. The city where I live is using aluminum wire for streetlights now after having miles and miles of copper stolen.