Railcar looted: Thieves make off with multiple packages in broad daylight
BAKERSFIELD, Calif. (KGET) – Your spanking new office printer might be delayed a few days in transit if it was on a FedEx railcar parked near Bakersfield’s Union Avenue Friday morning.
That rail car – the entire train – sat on those tracks long enough for opportunistic railcar raiders to carry off as many packages as their arms would hold.
It was an odd scene early Friday, on the tracks near Union, north of California Avenue. Perhaps a half-dozen people helped themselves in broad daylight to large packages from the back of a railcar. We don’t know how they gained access to the railcar, for how long, or what was taken. We don’t know if more than one railcar was compromised or if anyone was detained.
But we do know the alleged thieves took off in all directions, including one man on an adolescent-sized bicycle who seems to have noticed he was being tailed by our freelance cameraman. After a slow speed chase that took him through a McDonald’s parking lot, the man discarded the package he had taken. Perhaps he intended to come back for it later.
This kind of thing is all too common in California, where 54 percent of rail, highway and warehouse cargo theft was reported in 2023. That’s well ahead of second place Texas, which had 16 percent of the total.
The concentration of cargo theft cases on the West Coast starts in the Central Valley moves south, exploding into the Los Angeles basin.
20 percent of all cargo theft involves electronics, which appears to be the case in Friday’s incident. Second behind electronics is food and drinks, at 15 percent.
Overall cargo theft is on the rise, too. In 2023, shippers in the U.S. and Canada reported 1,183 cases of cargo thefts, averaging a loss of $587,000 each, for a total of $694 million, according to the risk management company, Overhaul Risk Advisory Services.
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That’s a 67 percent increase over the 2022 average of $351,000, and Overhaul expects that volume to increase another 35 percent this year.
Last year, rail comprised 14 percent of the cargo theft total. The rest is trucking, warehouses, company yards and parked vehicles.
Most of those losses are, of course, of a significant nature. Heists of entire truckloads, hijacking and deceptive pickups are among them, but incidents like Friday’s – broadly known as pilfering – represent more than a third of all cargo theft.
Who cares? Literally, in this case, who cares? The BNSF Railroad did not return our calls by airtime, and Bakersfield police had no information on the incident.
The big question is, who pays? Insurance companies, in most cases, which means, in the long run, we all do.
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