Lock it or lost it

FOUND: This SSL, stolen from the UK turned up in Sharjah.

TRACKING

Of course, all this is rather academic. An immobiliser might stop bored kids from wrecking havoc on a bulldozer in a city centre, but who is realistically going to drive off in a twenty tonne tracked excavator? The thieves will of course trailer the machine away to their own den, where any immobiliser can be picked over at their leisure.

Fitting a satellite tracking device can be a way of ensuring that the product can be tracked to distant shores.

Unfortunately, recovery rates are not as good as they might be with such devices, as when the plant is put in a container, it usually loses ‘reach’ of the sky and stops sending a signal to base.

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That isn’t to say that such devices never result in the return of equipment. Recently, one group of plant owners were celebrating following the successful retrieval in Sharjah of a JCB skid-steer loader stolen from the UK which had been fitted with a satellite tracking device.

After the alarm had been raised about the machine’s theft, by following the satellite reports from the tracking devices in the stolen skid-steer loader, it was found that the machine left the country from Southampton docks nine days after it was stolen.

Enigma, who provides the tracking service, contacted Southampton docks to get the timetable and schedule of all the ships sailing out of Southampton on the same date the skid-steer departed from the UK and found the ship on which the machine was transported was the Socol 2, bound for Gibraltar.

The machine was subsequently carried across the Mediterranean Sea and down the Suez Canal to Oman, where it was unloaded and moved along the coast.

Through further tracking, Enigma was able to pinpoint the new location of the machine in Sharjah, where it stopped moving a couple of days later.

Working alongside Enigma’s joint venture partner based in Dubai, they were able to arrange for an undercover representative to visit the location in Sharjah who found the machine and the people holding it.

To ensure the skid-steer loader was not sold on, the firm arranged for a deposit to be paid to hold the machine in place, while Interpol, working between the UK and Sharjah, completed the necessary paper work to recover the machine.

Three days later, the Sharjah police took two suspects into custody together with not only the skid-steer loader, but also a generator stolen from another plant hire company in the Manchester area.

Most people are not so lucky though, but fitting such devices makes the equipment much more of an insurable risk.

PHYSICAL LOCKS

There are a couple of other less glamorous, but effective ways of hanging onto your property. One of them is to physically secure the equipment with locks and chains. There are some firms that specialise in making locks just for construction vehicles.

One UK-based company named TLD makes some special locks that immobilise the steering mechanisms on many tracked and wheeled construction equipment. The firm also makes trailer locks, which allow the hitches of several trailers to be clamped together.

There are a number of other chassis locks available, most of them developed by the touring caravan industry in Europe (these little aluminum boxes are inexplicably popular in Europe – so much so, they are continually being stolen). Some of these fit over the coupling handles on trailers so that the brake can’t be taken off, or the hitch accessed.

However, there is one further way of ensuring your machines stay put in the yard. It isn’t perfect – far from it, but it is usually the best physical deterrent available. The method? Employ a security guard.