Oregon Pumper Uses Tracker to Recover Stolen Equipment

Oregon Pumper Uses Tracker to Recover Stolen Equipment

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When thieves stole one of Above All Sanitation’s portable restrooms along with its single-unit trailer, they didn’t realize there was a tracking device on it.

The company, located in Eugene, Oregon, has about 30 portable restrooms on single-unit trailers which they provide for customers who need to move around a lot, such as hay farms and utility companies.

“We even have roofers who do jobs that are three days and then they want to move to the next one and don’t want to pay for a unit that has to be dropped off, then picked up and moved,” says operations manager Travis Gates.

Units are moved by the customers as needed, so the company needs a way to locate them for servicing.

“We used to not have a way other than having our customer call in,” says Gates. “Or we’d have a specific spot on a specific day that they’d have to be.”

But in 2015, the company had enough of that and bought a Fleetmatics Reveal asset tracking system from Verizon Connect.

“We now have these non-powered asset trackers,” Gates says. “Once a day they ping and show us where the units are on the map so we have a rough idea. Obviously if a unit has been moved in the last couple hours before we get there it may not show and we may have to make a phone call, but the trackers have helped a tremendous amount.”

The stolen unit was chained and locked to a post when it was taken in the middle of the night, Gates says.

“They bolt-cut it and even took the toilet off the trailer, just trying to steal the trailer. But it pinged and we found it.”

The company called the police and quickly got everything back.

Read more about Above All Sanitation in this month’s issue of Pumper magazine.



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