Desperately Seeking Gas

Anyone who drives frequently these days is probably aware of the fact that since the end of summer, gas prices have been on the rise. As if that weren't enough, analysts are predicting that prices will continue to increase due to winter demands and more people driving. What can you do? We're a mobile society that wants to be warm in the cold winter. I can remember when I had my first car, gas prices for regular unleaded were hovering around 99 cents; it was cause for complaint if you had to pay more than a $1.50 for gas anywhere in the area. If you paid that much per gallon, people figured you either owned a sports car or lived in a swanky part of town. These days if you pay anything less than $2.00 per gallon you are considered lucky. There are many reasons for gas increases but I'm not really interested in laying the blame on anyone. It is a simple fact of modern life and we have to deal with it. Unfortunately, the way some people deal with it is not so bright; or so safe.

Take for example the case of the man in Albuquerque, New Mexico who was looking for a safer way to siphon gas from someone else's car. Typically siphoning requires you to insert a hose into the gas tank of a car and create suction by sucking the hose as if it's a straw. Soon, natural action results in the flow of gasoline and there, you have successfully siphoned gas from an automobile. Now this gentleman from Albuquerque decided to forego the risk of getting a mouthful of gasonline in his mouth (the inevitable result when siphoning) and decided to create some artifcial suction. How? With a vacuum cleaner of course! I can hear the slapping of foreheads all the way back here. I'm sure many people are thinking about how they should have though of that first. Now you know what to do with those cleaning tools!

Now before some of the more industrious of you out there get all excited and start off for the closet and an empty jerry can, read on to discover how our inventive friend fared. Well things apparently were going well when all of a sudden a spark was generated by the vacuum or something close by and the resulting explosion sent the man flying several feet with severe burns and the explosion was severe enough to force the city to close the area immediately surrounding the blast site. I'm sure people's first impression must have been that this was a terrorist attack but it isn't. It's merely the result of higher gas prices and desperate measures. Okay, so using household appliances that can spark and result in explosions, so it's probably a bad idea. What to do then?

Well, we could try and ask the person who stole an entire gas tanker from Baltimore and left it bone dry in DC. This happened a few weeks ago. A trucker hauling a tanker full of fuel stopped off at a rest stop in Baltimore and returned to find his rig stolen. Police in the region were called and shortly thereafter a search began. A few hours later the truck was found abandoned in a DC neighborhood with the keys in the ignition but the tanker was completely drained of fuel. Either someone hooked it up directly to their SUV for a day's worth of driving or someone has an ample supply of fuel stored at their house for some time. Whatever it is, it's a case for the arguement that alternate fuel sources need to be found in order to power automobiles. Either that or fuel efficiency standards need to change and they need to change now.

When you have so many people trying so many desperate and inane things to save a few hundred dollars per month for fuel, it's a sign that things are bad. Now things probably aren't as bad as they were during the fuel crisis of the 1970's but still, it's bad enough that people have started to do such things. Like the guy in the Bay Area of San Francisco who used a truck with a tank in the bed and marine batteries to power a pump that would then extract gas from underground tanks at gas stations. What he used to do was park over the outdoor fuel tanks and then dropping his hoses into the appropriate recepticles. Police estimate that he may have stolen hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of fuel. Whether for personal use or for black market sale, the fact remains that unless things improve, we're going to see a whole lot more of this kind of action.

I can sympathize with most of these people since I cringe every time I have to fill up my car with fuel. I dread driving up to the stations and seeing how high gas prices have gone. Still, perhaps it's my fear of going to prison for stealing gas or ending up burning off all my hair and starting to resemble a billiards ball, but I don't think I've gotten to that point yet where I'll start doing insane things to get fuel. Not yet. Maybe if we start seeing gas prices rising over $5 a gallon I'll start thinking about it but until then, I'll hope that no idiot with a dust buster comes over to my car in the middle of the night to rob me of my precious fuel. It's starting to resemble Mad Max out there!