As gas prices soar, thieves grow more brazen

Modern advances in fuel thievery
Gas caps won’t stop the most determined thieves, however.

“Right now, people are actually going to the extent of chopping the hose,” said Ryan Medler of Medler’s Automotive of Guam. “They’ll go to the extent of chopping it off and running a garden hose in to siphon out the fuel to their vehicles.”

That’s what happened to Donna Cotton, who counts on her three vans to get kids between school and her day care center in Augusta, Ga. She was shocked to find their gas tanks empty one morning last month. Thieves had cut the fuel lines and made off with about $150 of gas.

“With all the cars out there, why would you come to a day care?” Cotton asked. “It messed up my day. It really did.”

And when all else fails, an enterprising thief will go straight to the source.

Since March, two men have been driving around western Washington in the wee hours of the morning, stopping at Shell gas stations and making off with hundreds of gallons of fuel.

“It’s happened totally four times ... over a month or so,” said Tom Nguyen, manager of a Shell station in Sea-Tac, south of Seattle.  The owner of another station said he had lost $3,000, almost a month of profits.

After a Shell was hit in Gig Harbor, north of Tacoma, police said one of the men — who wore an orange safety vest, apparently to fool witnesses into thinking he was working on the pumps — appeared to have a master key that allowed him to tap into the metering system. In about 30 minutes, he filled large containers with more than 200 gallons of premium valued at nearly $800.

‘There’s always new ways’
Last month in Joppa, Ala., south of Huntsville, a white utility trailer pulled into a Four Way Quik Stop at 3 a.m. and just sat there. When officers checked it out, they found a 250-gallon tank, two 55-gallon drums and a gas pump inside.

Cullman County Sheriff Tyler Roden said the driver had parked above the station’s fuel tank. He’d drilled a hole in the floor of the trailer, pried off the cap of the tank and snaked a hose from his pump to the tank.

“If he can get the lid off that’s on the surface of the concrete, well, he can sit there and siphon gas out of the tank and ... not really be noticed,” Roden said.

The driver, identified as Billy Wayne Collier, 44, a mechanic, was charged with theft and criminal tampering, a felony.

“There’s always new ways that they are trying to be smarter than everybody else,” Roden said. “Just, in this case, it didn’t work out.”

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