Area man ran an illegal gas station, firefighters say

What? He had the requisite broom and kitchen chair. What else were they expecting?

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Yup. It’s the cornerstone of the legal fiction of corporate personhood. Our global economy relies on the capability of the people with money to make the legal consequences of their actions somebody else’s problem.

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Somehow this reminded me of this Always Sunny episode: https://itsalwayssunny.fandom.com/wiki/The_Gang_Solves_the_Gas_Crisis

Good point. Or as in Baja, where there are long stretches without gas stations. But then of course you’d want to store the gas in something far more official, like this:

tourists4gass

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I was going to say, its pretty common at small airstrips too, for avgas.

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It’s also common in farms, bus garages and construction sites for diesel fuel.
Normally is used a steel tank and one have to ask the permission from firefighters.

It will cost less to get diesel fuel wholesale than having to go at the fuel station, and it’s actually less paperwork.
diesel for farmer is taxed less than regular diesel and older diesel, and most newer diesel, will accept the heavier farm diesel, and so farm fuel has a strong dye while regular diesel is clear.
If a cop has suspects could simply look at the fuel filter, and if is green you are in trouble…

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Generator sets have a similar set of rules and restrictions. (I don’t mean the little tiny things like a honda camp generator, I’m talking the giant three phase monsters that run data centers.)

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There was a scam where thieves cut the floor out of a van, parked over the fill pipes at a gas station, then dropped a hose into the underground tank, and suck a few hundred gallons into a tank. With this business model it could be quite profitable.

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In the late 90s, I briefly worked for a company that scanned paper documents. The job involved looking at a scanned image of a document and entering metadata about it so you could search for people’s names, dates, products, whatever (presumably because human recognition of handwriting or faded letters was more reliable than OCR, or just cheaper at the time). A lot of it was legal docs for a gas company, where I learned that LUST stands for Leaking Underground Storage Tank and “remediation” is the technical euphemism for digging up acres of contaminated dirt where a LUST had been and dumping it somewhere legal. I got the impression that there’s a cut off date in the 50s or 60s before which the majority of gas station sites were just destined to be hugely contaminated.

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I’d love to see a movie or tv version of lo-fi heists like that. Reminds me a little of Breaking Bad (spoilers) where they pull a train robbery to steal some chemical they need.

Unfortunately, I don’t think the cutoff date for most of the tanks being leaky is anywhere near that far back. Most states have a LUST fund that’s like a sort of liability insurance for gas station operators, who also have to post a bond. But they still leak all the time, and the operator is often out of business by the time it’s discovered. The state just takes all the nearby people off well water and puts in some monitoring wells instead of paying to clean it up. Same with dry cleaners.

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Yikes, I had no idea about dry cleaners.

The dry cleaning solvent of choice was . Tetrachloroethylene. Organic-- but the wrong sort of organic.

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OCR is still not good at picking up handwriting. In fact, it’s still useless.

In fact, it’s retro. In the early days of internal combustion vehicles, there was no elaborate gas station infrastructure. Gasoline was sold in cans from general stores, drug stores, etc. my grandfather bought gas that way when he was young (in a very rural town where civilization took a bit longer to get there). My dad rode a horse to school in elementary because hay was easier to get than gas. The school had a stable, because lots of kids did this.

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This was my first question also- where is he getting the gas? It would have to be stolen for there to be any profit here. What’s shown in that photo is also not very much gas at all. That’s maybe 3-4 cars’ worth. Either he has a very regular (pardon the pun) cheap supplier, or maybe this is just a personal prepper horde of fuel and not a business at all. That would be very in character for Nevada.

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May have been purchased with stolen credit cards. Then you have to flip it somehow to make money.

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