JUMP TO: Why Should You Care About Construction Site Security” | Construction Site Security Guide | Contact Lloyd Security for Construction Site Security Systems
Security for construction sites is essential to running a successful operation. Each day, you expect your machines to be where you left them and your materials to be safe and ready for use. The last thing you want is to arrive at the job site early in the morning and discover that items are missing. Job site theft is a common occurrence in the construction industry. Thieves break into construction sites to steal the valuable materials, tools and machinery left unattended throughout the night. The lack of security leads criminals to view construction sites as easy targets with low risks and high rewards. You need a construction site security plan to make sure this type of theft stays far away from your job site.
Why Should You Care About Construction Site Security?
Security on construction sites is necessary for many reasons. The first reason deals with money — you need to protect your valuable assets and expensive materials. If a criminal steals your materials, that’s on you. Your client shouldn’t have to pay for missing materials on the job site they’re paying you to manage. You’ll have to buy the replacement materials to keep your client satisfied. Your company can accept certain construction projects because you have the necessary machinery. If someone steals your equipment, you can lose your ability to work certain jobs. You’ll have to turn down projects that use that gear, rent the right machines from another company or replace the stolen equipment. This last option can cost a lot of money. The second reason to implement security at construction sites is to stay on schedule. When thieves steal your gear and materials, they’re taking more than wealth. They’re stealing your time. You need to complete your project within your proposed time frame if you want your client to be happy and offer you more job opportunities in the future. Without the necessary materials or equipment, the project can come to a screeching halt. The third reason involves employee and pedestrian safety. If your job site is completely open to the public at all hours of the day, you’re allowing more than thieves to enter. Children, curious neighbors and other people can find themselves in a dangerous situation if your construction site lacks proper job site security. To decrease your liability and promote public safety, security on a construction site is a must.
Construction Site Security Guide
Now that you understand why construction site security is important, you need to put it into practice. Use the following tips as a construction site security checklist to keep your job site safe from theft and injuries:
1. Analyze Your Job Site’s Security Needs
In an ideal world, planning for job site security happens long before the job starts. If you analyze your job site before construction begins, you’ll reduce your chances of theft and break-ins. Walk around the area and ask yourself the following questions to take the next steps toward security at your construction site:
- Is the job controversial? Jobs can be controversial for many reasons, including destruction of historical landmarks, high levels of noise in residential areas or the lengthening of people’s morning and evening commutes. Stay in the loop with local news organizations and authorities to know if there is any controversy surrounding your job site. Controversy raises the risk of embittered citizens breaking in and vandalizing the location to prove a point.
- Is there a history of crime in the area? An area’s crime rates will affect how much security you’ll need. Talking to neighbors and police about crime in the area gives you more insight into how many layers of security you’ll need. A fence could be enough, but some locations demand more advanced and technological security measures.
- What does the job site look like at night? Visit your job site at night before and after construction begins to look for areas that need additional security. Work sites look different at night than they do in the day, so you want to make sure you know what potential thieves are seeing when they scope out the property. The goal is to make the location appear unassuming and hard to access, even in the dead of night.
- Are there any obvious places on the site needing extra security? While on that night visit, you can work on identifying “safety zones” that are highly visible from the road. If you discover vulnerable areas on your job site, do what you can during the day to make those spots safer and less appealing to thieves and criminals.
2. Create a Pre-Job Checklist That Improves Your Job Site Security
After you’ve analyzed your job site’s unique security needs, it’s time to develop your security checklist. This will help you track helpful information and take daily security measures. Here are a few easy things you can do to increase your job site security:
- Determine who will be accountable for job loss: Identify which employees will handle security on the work site. It could be a single security manager or a team that manages safety. Either way, it’s good to have a dedicated person or group of people whose primary goal is keeping your job site safe and secure.
- Take steps toward loss reduction: This includes essential orders of business, like a system to track where your materials and tools are and who is using them. Consider having your employees wear uniforms and badges. Lastly, use a sign-in sheet every day. It’s important to have a record of who was and wasn’t on your job site to make things easier if things go missing at any time of day.
- Gather community contacts: You should get to know the local authorities and first responders as soon as you sign the contract for your new construction project. Keeping close ties with these groups will keep you in good standing with the community and ensure you receive the right help if your job site is vandalized. For that reason, it’s also a good idea to get to know the neighbors who live near your work site. Their watchful eyes could be invaluable.
3. Check Your Construction Site Security Lighting
Thieves prefer to do their thieving under the cover of darkness. This allows them to move with confidence and anonymity. Using various lighting solutions on your job site can be a crime deterrent, as they will expose a criminal’s deeds for the whole neighborhood to see:
- Choose bright white light: Bright white light provides good color differentiation, making people easier to identify and license plates easier to read. However, they are also more expensive to keep lit. Many job site managers find the higher price worth the money since the lights allow them to distinguish important details with great clarity. As a general rule of thumb, observers should be able to identify a face at 30 feet.
- Protect your power source: Thieves can and will cut power lines to render lighting rigs useless and disable any alarms. You may be unable to bury your power lines on a temporary job site, so keep them high in the air to reduce the risk of a criminal cutting them.
Lighting your job site all night can be an expensive endeavor. Minimize costs while still providing great security with automatic and motion sensor lights. You can program these lights to turn on and off at various times of the night, making it seem like someone is on your job site. Motion sensor lights will stay off until something moves in their field of vision. When they turn on, they’ll cover the area in bright light and send criminals running.
4. Invest in Security Cameras for Your Job Site
A great idea is to combine motion sensor lights with job site surveillance cameras around all the entrances to your location as part of your construction site security plan. Make sure you cover any spot where thieves or vandals could enter without climbing or cutting open a fence. This setup can provide you with round-the-clock security for your construction site. As soon as an intruder comes close enough to be a potential threat to your operation, the lights will come on and the security cameras will begin recording. Some security cameras will send the feed straight to your smartphone so you can see what’s happening from home. Then, you can take action if they do not leave the premises. Most of the time, you can deter construction site vandalism with these features, as potential vandals will likely seek an easier target.
5. Create Security Questions for Your Daytime Construction Site
Many companies spend all their resources keeping the site secure at night, but they should also keep their locations safe and secure during the daytime. Many thieves will use the daytime to scope out job sites and see where you keep your expensive materials, equipment and tools. To avoid thieves disguising themselves as workers during the day, have all your employees wear uniforms. If people come to the job site in the wrong attire, your security team will know. Then they can ask these mysterious individuals a series of questions to determine why they are there. Asking the right questions allows your team to be non-confrontational while determining if the people are a security threat. Instead of asking vague, generalized questions, train your crew to ask more informative ones along these lines:
- “Who do you work for here?”
- “What do you do for that subcontractor?”
- “When did you and your sub come on the site?”
If the newcomers struggle to answer or use the names of people not on your employee roster, you’ll know trouble is brewing. You can then send these people packing by saying they need proper clearances to get on the job site.
6. Install a Security Fence
One of the first things you install for job site security should be a chain-link fence around the property’s perimeter. This can do a lot of good for your construction site’s security plan, but remember some criminals only view fences as a minor inconvenience. With the right tools or athleticism, criminals can make quick work of fences that stand between them and their payday. Consider the following aspects of your job site’s fence:
- Height: High fences are a physical deterrent because they are harder to climb, but they can also serve as a psychological deterrent. In most situations, you should seek to install at least 8-foot high fencing around your job site. The increased height over traditional 6-foot fencing can deter impulse vandals who may be apt to hop fences when the urge hits them.
- Clear zone: Keep the area around your fence clean and clear of obstructions. This clear zone will make it hard for criminals to hide and break into your job site undetected. It will also reduce a criminal’s chances of climbing over the fence by standing on debris.
- The number of gates: Reduce the number of gates allowing entry into your job site. Gates are one of the easiest things for criminals to break into, so the fewer, the better.
7. Keep an Eye on the Weather
It’s easy to forget that the weather can impact your job site’s safety. This is especially true in urban and residential areas where vehicle and pedestrian traffic is commonplace. As you wrap up your day’s work, always check the weather to see if you should take any special precautions to protect your materials and the job site as a whole. Failing to do so could result in a costly and potentially dangerous mistake. Make sure you protect materials that are at risk of damage from snow or rainfall. Keep items like insulation dry at all times to avoid purchasing replacements. Things like sheet metal, siding and other flat items should be securely fastened when you leave the job site to protect them against high winds that might carry them away. The damage caused by this can be both costly and dangerous if someone is walking or driving by at that exact moment. Invest in ratchet straps, chains, locks, tarps and other coverings to keep things secure and protected from the weather. This will also show your client that you care about protecting your materials and your job site’s safety from inclement weather and theft alike.
8. Be Consistent With Your Drug Screening and Testing
You may have employees who have worked for you for years, and you may hire others who you’ve only known for a few days. However long you’ve known your employees, you need to be consistent with your drug screening and drug tests. Forgetting this step could lead to some workers showing up to the job site under the influence. This could result in a person making a mistake they could have avoided if they were sober. There is no place for intoxication on the construction site. An intoxicated worker could harm themselves or another individual when operating dangerous tools or heavy machinery. In other situations, a worker may contemplate stealing from the job site to get extra cashs. Implementing random drug tests and requiring a negative drug screen during the hiring process are understandable and easy ways to ensure your workers are safe on the job.
Contact Lloyd Security for Construction Site Security Systems
At Lloyd Security, we care about your construction site’s safety and security. We understand you want to protect your valuable assets and equipment to keep operations running smoothly, now and for years to come. By partnering with us, you will increase your job site security with our video surveillance systems, commercial intrusion detection and access control systems. With Lloyd Security, you can make your job site safer for your employees and the surrounding neighborhood. Contact us online today for more information on how we can help make it happen.