Theft of cargo containers rises dramatically on weekends and holiday weekends, and insurers need to drive home the message to clients that those losses can be reduced by simply altering warehouse hours and shipping schedules.
“We found that 70 per cent of the losses occur from Friday night to Monday morning,” says Barry Tarnef, senior loss control specialist for the
Chubb Group of Insurance Companies. “The vulnerable time is when the truck is stopped.”
In North America, cargo theft in the United States and Canada is predominantly non-confrontational, with on 2 per cent of all recorded incidents involving violence or the threat of violence, according to research from FreightWatch. Mexico however is almost exclusively violent, with armed thieves roaming the highways and stealing cargo seemingly at will.
It is the non-confrontational method here that leads to the high percentage of theft when transport containers are stolen, says Tarnef – where thieves take advantage of truck drivers who transport loads on Fridays to ‘get a jump’ on the competition.
“So if they ship something on the Friday to get it there Monday, they think they are ahead of the game,” he says. “In essence they are playing into the hands of cargo thieves – because that is when cargo thieves are the most active.”
It isn’t unusual that you will see a transport truck parked at a Big Box store, says Tarnef, as many drivers will leave their truck at the store and go home for the weekend.
“If you can avoid weekends, if you can avoid overnight stops, that to me makes the most sense,” says Tarnef.
Although data is difficult to gather in Canada due to a lack of centralized recording or information delivery system, the number of recorded incidents rose by 18 per cent from 2011 to 2012. U.S. numbers show a total of 946 cargo theft incidents for 2012 – the highest on record, according to FreightWatch’s 2013 Global Cargo Theft Threat Assessment report.
The largest cargo theft in Canada for 2012 was the facility burglary of an estimated $30 million in maple syrup from the Global Strategic Maple Reserve in Quebec, where six million pounds (16,000 barrels) of syrup were siphoned into tanker trucks and hauled away.
Only two-thirds of the stolen syrup was recovered, in
Sedgwick, New Brunswick.
