Crawford County commissioners were provided an update on a road grader that was tampered with on a job site by District 1 Associate Commissioner Mark Pfeiffer during a Sept. 30 meeting. A citizen reported suspicious activity near the grader, and it was removed from the site for inspection.

“District 1 had a road grader that was potentially tampered with the weekend of Sept. 7. We extracted fluid samples, sent them off for testing, and realized that the transmission had some type of foreign substance in it,” Pfeiffer explained.

To prevent any damage to the grader, Pfeiffer said, he had it towed to McCoy Construction & Forestry in Cuba to be evaluated and work completed to ensure the machine would not be permanently affected.

“We had the entire piece of equipment fluids flushed out of it and refilled,” Pfeiffer said. “A citizen had contacted us on Sept. 7, contacted the foreman anyway, and said the engine inspection door was open on the machine, which is abnormal. So, he went to check it out and realized there was some potential tampering that happened with it.”

Pfeiffer said the county took the necessary steps to ensure no further damage was done to the grader, and it is now back in operation after the evaluation and flushing of fluids.

“It’s working as we speak right now, so we will see, but that was probably around $6,500 worth of repairs that were unnecessary,” he said. “At probably a $400,000 replacement for a grader, you go ahead and spend the $6,500 to get it fixed because we’re not in the position of replacing a piece of equipment like that at this point.”

The county, he told commissioners, is taking additional steps to protect sites where equipment is left overnight, but it is difficult, as many of these sites are several miles out in the county, and it is not ideal to keep moving the large equipment back and forth.

“We are reactive and we are parking each piece of equipment in more secure locations, but if it continues, we’ll have to bring them back to the shed every night, which will reduce the amount of production we get during the day and put more wear and tear on the equipment every day. So, we’ll see how it goes,” Pfeiffer said.

District 2 Associate Commissioner Jared Boast said it takes about 20 percent of every day if equipment must be driven back to the county shed, which puts additional stress on employees working on projects as quickly and efficiently as possible.

“I don’t know what the answer is. It’s a constant battle. You know, we leave ours at a couple of designated farms and that brings questions up of why are they down in the driveway and why they are there. I believe those are old-term questions and not new-term questions. It’s a mess. Here you are out there trying to do what you can do with limited resources as it is and then there’s a large expense,” Boast said.

Pfeiffer pointed to a recent project the county was working on that took approximately three hours to simply reach the job site before any work was started and having to move equipment to these sites further out in the county made it even more imperative that the equipment can remain on site safely.

“Like I said, we’re being reactive, but we’re putting measures in place that is going to secure these pieces of equipment better. That’s not going to deter the persistent people, obviously, who want to do things, but we’ve got land owners and stuff like Mr. Boast said, “we’ve got land owners, (where) we can park these pieces of equipment at that is a little more secure.”

Pfeiffer said the county is also taking advantage of dusk-to-dawn lights and securing cameras that residents may have that have coverage of the areas where equipment is being stored at night. He said the grader affected was only four years old, so if damage had occurred, the county would be in a bad position in trying to replace it.

“It is a 2021 model, so it’s very new, and it’s very unfortunate we could have had a catastrophic event on that grader,” Pfeiffer said.