Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.
Heists Targeting Truckers On Rise
Thieves are swiping tractor-trailers filled with goods, triggering a spike in cargo theft on the nation’s highways.
Over five days last month, an 18-wheeler carrying 710 cartons of consumer electronics was stolen from a Pennsylvania rest stop, a 53-foot-long rig packed with 43,000 pounds of paper was ripped off in Ottawa, Ill., and a 40-foot-long truck filled with reclining armchairs went missing in Atlanta.
Truckloads containing $487 million of goods were stolen in the U.S. in 2009, a 67% increase over the $290 million worth of products swiped a year earlier. Thieves stole 859 truckloads in 2009, up from 767 loads in 2008 and 672 in 2007, according to FreightWatch International, an Austin, Texas-based supply-chain security firm that maintains a database of thefts that several government agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, look to for trends.
Signs of the times. I spent a year swinging freight at a terminal for a trucking company and some trailers were just useless crap, some were with huge bucks (cigarettes were several thousand dollars per case and we’d get a hundred cases at a time), and some were just a mix. Sometimes we even got pallet loads of bullets and ammo from Speer and Hornady. I remember moving 55 gallon drums full of bullets, weighing them on my forklift, doing the math, and thinking “Wow, theres 125,000 bullets there”.
No surprise that if someone who knows how to hook/unhook a trailer and can drive a truck might find easy pickin’s…esp. in this economy when youc an probably flip the contents of the truck pretty easily what with everyone looking for a bargain. I suppose the very savvy criminals with an eye on the long term would steal stuff they know they can use and keep.
I suppose its not too far a stretch until we see similar things happening to rail freight. A train sits in a yard overnight and the next day all the choice freight is missing. A bit harder in a secured yard, but out here you sometimes see trains just sit overnight on the rails in the middle of nowhere.
Not sure if this is evidence of a slide into a bigger catastrophe but it certainly is interesting nonetheless.
