The jobsite, a building under renovation near the Honey Creek Mall in Terre Haute Indiana, was secured at the end of the day in typical fashion – locks and dead bolts on both the front and rear doors of the building and a functioning alarm system. Sometime in the night, the would-be thieves entered the building from the rear, prying the outer steel door completely off its hinges, destroying the dead bolt and closer, after first removing the electrical meter on the exterior wall of the building.
Upon entering, the forceful intruders seemingly went straight for the KNAACK® storage box sitting in the middle of the foyer, assuming it contained valuable tools – completely ignoring other equipment on the second floor that had been left unsecured and in plain sight. With the chest padlocked to a stair rail with a vinyl-coated, cut-resistant cable, the thieves attempted to penetrate the KNAACK® Jobmaster® Chest by prying open holes around the lid of the chest in order to remove the contents.
While local police didn’t know how long the would-be thieves worked at prying open the tool chest, intruders want to get in and get out with the equipment within about 5-10 minutes. “The box was pretty damaged when I found it the next day,” said Ben Douglas, Equipment Manager for Garmong Construction Services, “We estimated the value of the equipment inside the box at approximately $3,000. When you add up the value of the tools inside the box, the amount of downtime, plus the whole process of filing an insurance claim for the stolen tools – well, the Jobmaster® paid for itself right there – many times over in fact.”
Construction site theft is big business in the U.S. and Canada, with annual losses totaling nearly 1 billion dollars, as reported by the U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI. In addition to the value of the materials and equipment taken, there are the indirect costs which greatly compound the financial consequences suffered by the contractor and/or building owner. Costly job delays, downtime for operators, higher insurance premiums, and the possible
cancellation of an insurance policy, with the accompanying risk of jeopardizing bonding and borrowing power, make jobsite security practices crucial for commercial construction firms.
“In fifteen years of selling, managing and purchasing construction equipment, I have seen several jobsites and storage devices broken into by thieves,” Douglas adds. “This is honestly the first time I have seen evidence of a piece of security equipment perform better than advertised and greater than expected. I will forever be a Knaack customer.
