Tuesday, May 8, 2001

Gas pumps running dry at hundreds of stations

AUSTIN (AP) — Hundreds of gasoline pumps across Texas are running dry because station owners missed a deadline for certifying their underground tanks are insured and safe from leaks.

The Legislature barred petroleum wholesalers from delivering gasoline after May 1 to stations that didn't file the required paperwork with the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission.

Since the cutoff, the agency has received about 1,000 filings that it hopes to process by late this week.

About half the late filers appear to be retail stores, the Austin American-Statesman reported Monday. The rest include governments, businesses and farms that fuel their own equipment.

Some station operators, however, say they were stuck in the middle and now find themselves high and dry.

Doug and Kathy Lee lease the Chevron Food Mart they operate in Florence. The notices from the commission would by law have gone to the station owner, Adnan Sattar. The station ran out of gas on Friday.

Sattar said he never received any of the four agency mailings for the Florence site and three of his other stations.

“It appears to have been mailed to the wrong address,” Sattar said. “If it takes 10 days to get approval for delivery, each station will have lost $40,000 to $60,000 in revenue from gas sales.”

Losses at the Lee's Chevron station were minimal, however. Apparently the paperwork had been processed and the station received a delivery on Saturday.

Despite the financial hardships, the trade association that represents 75 percent of the state's gasoline wholesalers and convenience stores offers little sympathy, even to those who claim they merely overlooked the deadline.

“The problem is, these owners and operators didn't respond to multiple mailings from the TNRCC since July,” said Scott Fisher, vice president of the Texas Petroleum Marketers and Convenience Store Association.

“The idea is to cut the fuel supply to those who don't have insurance, who haven't spent $50,000 it cost the average store owner to upgrade equipment, because if there is a leak at one of those locations, you and I will pay to clean it up,” Fisher said.

Texas has spent more than $500 million to clean up contamination from leaking underground petroleum tanks, most of it paid by a fee on petroleum deliveries.

http://www.reporternews.com/2001/texas/pump0508.html

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), May 07, 2001