Kent, WA, is a growing city, and with growth comes challenges, such as asset management and asset protection. That’s why the Kent Public Works Department purchased AllTrak Cloud with L2P asset tracking hardware when adding two new robotic total stations to its equipment portfolio.
While asset management was the main reason for the purchase, Joseph Fraumeni, Survey Party Chief, Land Survey/GIS, in the Kent Public Works department, says they also knew the technology could provide asset protection. And it wasn’t long before Fraumeni put the L2P software asset protection from Trimble to good use.
“There wasn’t an equipment theft problem at the time, but incidents of stolen robotics were increasing, especially in Seattle, which is only a 15- minute drive from Kent,” says Fraumeni, who handles land survey projects, including capital construction and improvements such as road or bridge enhancements. One of his concerns was that a car would pull up to a jobsite and steal the city’s S7 robotic total station from Trimble.
And, then it happened…
A surveying crew in a residential neighborhood was preparing a topographic survey for a city beautification project and had set up the S7 in a nearby lot. The crew was about 200 feet from the total station when they lost the radio link. They looked over to the S7, and it was gone. A witness told them a car had pulled up and a fast-acting thief had grabbed the instrument and sped away.
The surveyors quickly called Fraumeni to tell him what happened. “At first I thought they were joking, but when I realized they were serious, I immediately logged onto AllTrak and clicked the locate button to find our equipment.” AllTrak initiated a real-time stream that allowed him to monitor the movement of the S7 and see the equipment’s location. AllTrak was also able to tell him whether the equipment was indoors or out, and the time it arrived and was removed from the site.
Within minutes of logging on, Fraumeni had spotted the total station in a moving vehicle driving on the highway. “We contacted the police while I followed the vehicle online. Once the vehicle came to a standstill, I gave the police the location, which was a parking structure near a mall. The police arrived and put the car under surveillance. It was parked next to another vehicle, and when the police saw people emerge from both cars and exchange money and the S7, they made the arrest.”
An hour later, the total station was back at the jobsite, intact. The thieves had removed the battery, thinking it was a digital tracker and not realizing the L2P tracker comes built into the Trimble S-Series total stations.
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Power with ease of use
According to Fraumeni, L2P is simple to use. “Once you are logged in, you get standard icons that make it easy to operate. I executed the search right away.”
Fraumeni says the ability to quickly pinpoint the location of the instrument and its route helped with the speedy recovery.
Fraumeni thinks the theft might be part of a Washington crime ring and hopes the arrest will thwart future thefts. But the increase in equipment theft goes beyond the Northwest. In 2016, the National Insurance Crime Bureau (NICB) and the National Equipment Registry (NER) estimated that the annual cost of construction equipment theft nationwide ranged from $300 million to $1billion, and only 21% of this equipment was ever recovered. Beyond the physical loss, there are also hidden costs such as reduced productivity and job loss.
“When we purchased the two S7s, the dealer asked if we wanted a tracking service and we said, ‘Absolutely.’ “ Fraumeni says. “That was in 2018, and we’ve never looked back. Thanks to AllTrak, within 30 minutes of the theft the police had the suspects in custody and within 30 minutes of the arrest we were back on site with the S7.”
