Stu Davidson Plant Hire
Construction company owners in Nelson Mandela Bay are ramping up the security on their heavy-duty machinery and re-evaluating their policies and procedures when it comes to hiring out these vehicles.
Scribante Construction, Moss Plant Hire and Stu Davidson & Sons all report having had construction vehicles stolen in recent months.
In the latest incident, a giant R3.5 million grader belonging to the Davidson’s was removed from a secure lock-up at a school in Zwide over the weekend.
CEO Patrick Davidson told Algoa FM News that Kwazakele police followed up on information and were able to recover the machine in Njara Street in Motherwell on Monday evening – minus all its company signage and with its bright red wheel hubs painted over in another colour.
He said there was definitely a syndicate involved as his company was not the first to be targeted.
Scribante Construction owner Aldo Scribante agreed that criminals were targeting the ‘yellow metal’ market in the Metro and that his company was having to be far more vigilant with its equipment.
Scribante said they’d had a TLB (Tractor Loader Backhoe) stolen from a construction site at Dora Nginza hospital in February this year and that it had never been recovered.
He said the TLB was worth close on R1 million and that they were waiting for insurance to pay them out.
Clinton Moss, who owns Moss Plant Hire in the Bay, said he’d had two TLB’s stolen.
The first one was stolen several years ago and was never seen again, while Moss was able to recover the second one from a yard in Motherwell earlier this year.
“We tracked the TLB through a secondary tracker which the thieves had not disabled properly, “ recalled Moss. “We got the police to accompany us and the people at the house were actually quite cocky about it when we laid claim to our machine. The dashboard had been stripped to remove the main tracker, but we had been able to monitor the TLB’s movements and how it had gone from New Brighton, out to Redhouse, and then to Motherwell and a yard just down from the new police station.”
Moss said the modus operandi seemed to be a ‘client’ booking out a machine and then it disappears from the client’s lock-up.
“The onus is on the client keeping the vehicle safe as we are fairly trusting in the industry here,” said Moss. “We are fast realising, however, that we need to tighten up our rental policies and jack-up the security on our constructions vehicles to keep our rather valuable assets safe.”
