Guards on the gate, towers over the perimeter, and ACS operators watching live once the crews go home. Coverage gets repositioned as the site changes shape, from excavation to handover.
Nobody counts construction theft nationally in Canada. What is published — copper off the network, offences on American sites, fire damage after midnight — all points the same way.
Ontario · 2026
0first half of 2026
copper theft and vandalism incidents on Bell's Ontario network in six months — 58% of a national total that rose 78% year over year.
Bell · reported August 2026United States
0construction sites · 2025
offences recorded on U.S. construction sites in 2025 by NIBRS-reporting agencies — 29,316 thefts, 10,466 break-ins and 1,692 vehicle thefts among them.
FBI · NIBRS table 1845%of fire damage
of direct property damage in U.S. under-construction fires came from fires set on purpose — fewer than one in ten of the fires. Just over half of all the damage came between midnight and 6 a.m.
NFPA · fires 2017–2021Copper: Daily Commercial News, 14 August 2026, reporting Bell's count of incidents on its own network — not a count of construction-site theft, which no Canadian body publishes. U.S. site offences from the FBI's NIBRS table 18 (2025, released August 2026), counting what participating agencies recorded. Fire figures from NFPA, Fires in Structures Under Construction (October 2023), U.S. fires 2017–2021; there is no Canadian equivalent.
Excavation, frame, floors, close-in: the loss moves every few weeks, and the coverage moves with it. This is one build the way ACS positions for it, phase by phase.
The site as it is actually marked for monitoring — the monitored area, crossline detection on both ways in, and the camera cluster at the head of the mast.
The washed ground is the zone — the machines, the materials and the ground they stand on. A person entering it after hours is spoken to live over the tower.
A line across each way in. Crossing it after hours starts the sequence — verify, speak, escalate — while whoever crossed is still on open ground.
The red trace is the unit; the pulse is the camera cluster at the top of its mast. It stands inside the area it watches, so anyone reaching for it has already been seen.
What is worth stealing on a build changes four times before handover, and it never changes back. Coverage that was right at excavation is pointed at empty ground by drywall.
On a site with no building on it, the machines are the site. They sit in the open with the keys in a box, and a tracked excavator is on a trailer and gone in the time it takes to back up to it — at an hour when a low-loader on the road looks like work.
Steel, forms, scaffold and lifting gear are sold by weight and cut down before they are sold. Once it is in the back of a truck there is nothing left on it that says it came from your site, which is why almost none of it is ever recovered.
Glazing, membrane and roofing copper all land inside a few weeks — and the building is now closed enough that a person inside it cannot be seen from the fence line. A perimeter camera is watching the wrong thing from here on.
Appliances, mechanical plant, wire and tools. At this stage the loss is not the price of what went missing — it is the handover date, because every one of those items is ordered weeks ahead and the schedule has no float left in it.
More than half of the fire damage on U.S. builds happens between midnight and 6 a.m.
NFPA · Fires in Structures Under Construction · U.S. fires 2017–2021 · figures aboveA site changes shape every few weeks, and so does where the loss comes from. Here is what ACS puts where, and what each position is there to stop.
At the gate, from day one
A licensed officer on the gate for deliveries, trades and sign-in, through the hours the site is open and the ones it is not.
Over the perimeter
A 25-ft mast on solar with its own connection, so coverage starts before the power does and relocates as the build moves across the site.
After the crews leave
An operator checks what the detection flags and speaks to whoever is on the site, over the tower.
Between the towers
Mobile Patrol & Alarm Response
Scheduled checks on gates, fencing, fuel and the material store, and an officer attending an alarm at any hour.
Site office and compound
Fixed cameras on the trailer, the compound and the stores, recording in colour at night with footage you can hand to an insurer.
Most builds start with one of these and add the next as the site opens up. The walkthrough decides the order — see what an assessment covers
A build needs equipment that arrives before the power does and gets repositioned as the footprint changes — not a system commissioned once and left pointing at last month’s compound.
Where there is already a trailer, the cameras and the speaker go straight onto it — covering the gate, the compound and the door everyone signs in at, with no separate structure to place.
Not sure what your site needs at this phase? Ask an operator who watches builds like yours.
(519) 800-3947
Problem: an active build with exposure that shifted phase by phase.
Plan: guards on the gate, a mobile defense tower on the perimeter, live virtual oversight after hours.
Outcome: continuity across every phase, and one record of site activity.
Yes. We assess the site as it is now, current phase, current exposure, and deploy the layers that fit.
The assessment decides. Many sites run a hybrid: gate guard by day, tower and virtual oversight overnight.
Patrol rounds, tower deterrence and live operators on the feeds, with documented escalation when activity turns into risk.
A daily report with photos, timestamps and gate activity, plus incident reports whenever something happens.
They're planned as the highest-exposure windows, coverage is scheduled before the long weekend, not after it.
Sometimes. A tower with live oversight can hold a perimeter alone; the assessment tells us when a hybrid serves the site better.
Question not covered here? Call (519) 800-3947 and talk to the team that runs the coverage.
