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Tasi Malala was driving with her girlfriend to get breakfast outside of Scottsdale, Arizona, last month when she noticed her Toyota pickup was getting very low on gas and was running low. He pulled into a station and started charging the premium. That’s when he noticed the leak.
“I looked under my truck, and it was literally just gassing out of the bottom,” said Malala, 31.
It turns out he was the target of a new popular method of stealing gas: simply drilling a hole. All a thief needs is a handheld electric drill and a can of gas – or even a few jugs of milk – for a few minutes alone. Malala was left with a perfectly round hole in her tank and a nearly $3,000 repair bill. His truck had been in the shop for about a week.
This type of drilling and extraction theft appears to be increasingly common as the war with Iran has pushed gasoline prices to four-year highs and older – and less destructive – methods of stealing fuel have become harder to shut down.
In Los Angeles, where gas prices are regularly among the nation’s highest at $6 a gallon, service consultant Lupes Armas said his repair shop is fixing a drilled-out gas tank once a week these days. This happened a couple of times a year.
“It’s definitely a problem,” Armas said.
Insurers are also starting to see more damage claims, although at this point, just weeks into the war and spiking gas prices, the reports are mostly anecdotal, according to the National Association of Mutual Insurance Companies. It takes time to see how bad it is.
“Let’s hope this is a short-term event,” said Brett Odom, the insurance group’s vice president of policy.
Repairs are covered by comprehensive auto policies, experts say.
Drilled-out gas tanks are similar to the occasional wave of stolen catalytic converters, which can be removed from vehicles with power saws and then sold for the precious metals inside, said Bob Passmore, vice president of personal lines for the Property Casualty Insurance Association of America.
That is also an expensive repair.
The shift to drilling holes in fuel tanks comes as the old method of stealing gas fades: siphoning.
In the 1970s, the country’s chronic gas shortage led to people throwing plastic tubing — even garden hoses — into the gas tanks of parked cars to get their fuel out. The image of someone sucking on the end of a tube to initiate suction (and spitting out gas as it reaches the lips) became a pop culture trope.
The trick was annoying, but it didn’t cause permanent damage.
Car owners responded by purchasing locking gas caps and keeping a vigilant eye on their parked vehicles.
Malala said she would have preferred that the thief who hit her pickup had gone the old fashioned way.
“I wish they would just siphon it off,” he said.
But siphoning today is more difficult than yesterday.
Most newer vehicles have narrow, curved filler necks that lead to the gas tank, making it difficult to attach the tube inside. Some vehicles also have internal flappers or baffles to prevent siphoning. And anti-pollution regulations mean fuel systems are often well sealed.
All types of gas theft follow pump prices. Filling stations report more drive-offs, though that, too, has been tougher for prepay pumps. Some people have been arrested for throwing tubes in the underground storage tank at the service station to steal gas. Others have used electronic devices to trick pumps into dispensing fuel for pennies on the dollar.
At least a decade later there have been sporadic reports of thieves drilling into car gas tanks.
But higher gas prices trigger more incidents, such as when the national average price briefly hit an all-time high of $5 a gallon in mid-2022, following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Now, high gas prices are back — with consequences.
One morning this month, workers at St. Vincent de Paul, a Catholic charity in St. Louis, noticed a black spot on the ground next to a panel truck they use as a mobile food pantry.
Someone had leaked expensive diesel and put a hole in the gas tank.
Michael Meehan, the charity’s executive director, said they lost a full tank of gas. And the damage means they’ll be without their truck for a while. They had to find a replacement to use for their mobile food pantry in the meantime.
Meehan said he sympathizes with whoever did it.
“It’s just another sign that these are tough times for a lot of people,” he said.
But he wished he had chosen a different path to get what he wanted.
“Siphoning would have saved us some money,” he said.
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