Stolen construction equipment discovered in Mission
Posted March 9, 2012 4:59 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
MISSION (NEWS1130) – Mission Mounties have found a stash spot for a group of heavy equipment thieves who work the graveyard shift.
More than half a million dollars worth of stolen excavators, tractors and other equipment has been seized.
Cpl. Sharon Siluch says they got a tip from a business owner nearby about suspicious activity on Hartley Road near Stave Lake Road.
“When our members got there, they found four or five big box metal containers that were quite large,” Siluch added.
“There were also a bunch of brand new bulldozers and excavator trailers. We spoke with the owner of the property and he had no idea it was there. We got permission to go on the property and everything on there was stolen and it was from all over.”
The heavy duty machines were taken from businesses, auction houses and construction sites in Chilliwack, Langley, Coquitlam and possibly other cities in the Lower Mainland.
Siluch says the group is highly sophisticated.
“They [work] at night time and they’ve done it before,” Siluch confirms.
“They would cut fences to go in. They’re very elaborate where they know if there’s GPS tracking on some of this larger equipment. They might disable the equipment itself so that we can’t track it.”
Siluch says forensic investigators have developed some good leads about who is involved but she can’t elaborate.
No arrests have been made.
Thefts on home-construction sites nothing new
Talk of a clampdown on thieves who target industrial equipment has people in the construction industry swapping their favourite stories. Crooks, it seems, aren’t only stealing bobcats and tractor trailers.
Peter Simpson with the Greater Vancouver Homebuilders Association says big thefts from home construction sites are nothing new. “The thieves take everything that is not bolted down, and in some cases things that are bolted down. They take out furnaces as well, and use the motors for grow ops,” he explains.
He says things got so bad a few years ago, builders started installing GPS systems in expensive home fixtures in order to track them in the event they were stolen.
He points out homes that are targeted are in fact victimized twice.
“The culprits typically would pull the appliances away, breaking the plumbing. By dragging the appliances, they would damage the floor then the water would do the rest of the damage.”
He says a particularly heartbreaking kind of construction-site crime is the theft of someone’s personal tools…which forces the employee out of work and out of money to replace them.
