A puff of blue smoke from the exhaust was the first clue something was amiss in Kelly Yarwood's Ford F150.
The Alcona man was one of more than 20 Esso customers who found their vehicles in poor working order after pumping fuel on Jan. 15 and 16.
“My truck was parked all weekend. On Monday, I went to start it and it wasn’t starting properly. It puffed out a big blue smoke and then died,” Yarwood said.
Standing near the closed pumps at the Esso station on Innisfil Beach Road, Yarwood was checking his banking records on his phone to prove he had bought gas and was an affected customer.
Pointing to the sign out front that offered an extra 2,000 President Choice points with a purchase, Yarwood said that giveaway may have cost him dearly.
“I might need new plugs, new filters, stuff like that. I only came for the PC points and I could have wrecked my truck,” he said.
Local mechanic Bryce Keller, at Nubridge Auto Center on County Road 4, said if the product pumped into the vehicle’s fuel tanks is diesel, it’s better to have erroneously received diesel in a gasoline automobile than it is to put gasoline into a diesel-powered vehicle.
“That would be very expensive repairs. You can actually melt the pistons in the engine,” Keller said.
However, he expects vehicles that may have received potentially Esso’s tainted fuel will be reparable.
His advice is don’t run the engine or drive it to a mechanic.
“Get it towed,” Keller said.
Rod Boynton, who has owned the Esso station for the past 26 years, said his first priority is getting to the bottom of the complaints about bad gas at his station.
“We are investigating this whole issue and our customers are not wrong. We stand behind our customers, each and every one of them,” Boynton said over the phone from Florida. “We have a number of our customers that are coming in and they’re in a pickle.”
Boynton said several customers, like Yarwood, didn’t drive their vehicles on the weekend and only discovered an issue on Monday or Tuesday.
“We have launched a full investigation. We have had one of our technical companies come in and examine the fuel. There’s no water anywhere, so this is not a water issue. We think that another product might have been accidentally put into our tank,” he said.
As for the suggestion the other was fuel may have been diesel, Boynton said he can’t comment until that has been confirmed as such by a laboratory.
This isn’t the first time Boynton has had to deal with poor fuel. Twenty years ago, a tanker that had once carried water – and changed to carrying fuel – dumped a load of watered-down fuel into the holding tanks, he said.
Several vehicles were affected and the matter was dealt with promptly, he said.
“So it’s not something we would take lightly. Everyone is emotional right now and we understand that. I’ve been in this town an awful long time and I intend to be there for a long time yet and we need to hold our head up in this town. We’re not slouching, we are jumping on this,” Boynton said.
