Momentum Freight's Weblog

When we were serving as our own trucking service last week moving back to Michigan and had a van full of clothes and personal effects sitting outside a hotel, I noted that the hotel warned people to bring their valuables inside and that they weren’t liable for lost property. That might not be a huge risk for us with nothing much that would be pawnable to steal, but the same isn’t true of trucks. Truck drivers often leave their trucks unattended to eat, use the restroom and sometimes sleep; that makes their trailer a possible target for cargo theft.

A new online database of theft data called CargoNet is being set up to try and track trends in cargo theft and to set up procedures for certifying truck stops for their security. One of the things that I could see happening at a truck stop or hotel is that if a thief knows that a trucker is going to have to sleep for eight hours and be off-duty for ten hours based on hours-of-service rules, he won’t be around to check on his trailer. The thief has literally all night to wait for the right moment to bring up a van, pop open the back of the trailer and offload the goods; if they can break in quietly at 3AM, no one would notice.

The job of a good truck stop security plan would be to make sure that right moment never happens. Video surveillance can help prevent theft, but better police interest in such cases can help; since the victim is likely from out-of-town, the police might not be as interested.

Getting people to use such secure facilities can be a problem, since that will add to the cost of a truck stop. Penny-pinching owner-operator trucking firms might opt for less expensive facilities, but better off trucking transport firms could be more likely to afford such facilities.

Sources: http://www.securitydirectornews.com/?p=art…=sd201001TRglZn
http://www.iso.com/Products/CargoNet/Cargo…ry-Network.html