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The three words that enabled the recovery of an entire fleet of survey instruments within four hours of theft
DESPITE a break-in that occurred one Saturday night at 10.30pm, Storm Geomatics was fully operational the following Monday morning at 7.00am thanks to CCTV, Trimble’s Sentinel Track and Locate app, a fast police response and some hard work from the Storm team that saw all the recovered instruments checked and recalibrated over the weekend.
Whilst instrument theft continues to be a problem in our profession, it is always rewarding to hear from companies such as Storm Geomatics that thieving from premises can be reacted to quickly and effectively and that investment in technology is part of the solution.
Theft timeline
10.30pm
CCTV at the Storm premises picked up unusual activity alerting the monitoring company who called the police and Storm Geomatics managing director Mike Hopkins.
10.37pm
Smoke is released in the building and the thieves leave with stolen equipment escaping through a hedge and setting off on foot across fields.
10.47pm
Mike Hopkins arrives on site along with the police and a tracker dog which picks up a scent but cannot locate the thieves. Further police attend the scene in an attempt to find the panicked thieves.
12.45am
Mike contacts Storm operations director Anthony Pritchard who logs into the Trimble Sentinel app to see if one of the chipped Trimble total stations can be tracked
12.55am
Latitude/longitude reference shows the position of the stolen goods with a time stamp of 12:51am. The lat/lon is converted to a what3words reference and given to the police.
01:30am
A police dog team go straight to the what3words reference – equipment is found abandoned in a wheelbarrow in a hedge: Four total stations, one SX10, two controllers, two R12 GNSS units, a level and other survey accessories. The yellow boxes were discarded.
2.10am
The stolen instruments are handled with gloves, placed in the back of a Landrover and returned to a safe place.
Tracking technology
Sentinel is available as an after-market add-on for Trimble S Series and C5 instruments. Its usefulness goes beyond retrieving missing instruments. It can also help find teams in the field at any given time, and contains a G-force sensor that sends alerts to users to check instruments for calibration errors or damage when they’ve been dropped or have endured a rough ride.
Lucy Hamilton, KOREC Group, with Polly Hopkins, Company Secretary, Storm Geomatics
There’s no doubt that this was a planned operation with the thieves arriving with an angle grinder to cut through the wall of the building and attempts to remove the external CCTV cameras.
In this case, our investment in security measures has paid off 100%. The police could not have been more responsive and in a particularly busy period for us, our customers were completely unaffected – on Monday morning by 7.00am all our instruments had been checked, calibrated and ready to go.
Polly Hopkins, Storm Geomatics