Shailesh Parekh, director of Midland Motor Fuels, is warning fellow forecourt operators to check the integrity of their fuel tanks to avoid “unfathomable” potential consequences, after a water ingress incident at one of his sites.
Contaminated unleaded petrol at his Sussex Service Station on Brighton Road in Birmingham affected 10 cars at the end of last year, and Parekh has since embarked on a programme of checking and relining tanks across his seven-strong estate which will be complete next month, costing him over £170,000.
He says that he was fortunate that the relatively small hole in the 60-year-old tank causing the issue was high enough to prevent the loss of fuel into the ground. If that had happened Parekh believes that he could have faced a bill potentially for hundreds of thousands of pounds. He believes the area’s high groundwater level was a reason the contamination occured.
Instead, he had to pay nearly £8,000 in replacing some of the cars’ fuel injectors and flushing out their engines – with all but two of the motorists affected agreed to have the repairs carried out at Parekh’s vehicle repair business.
The Erdinton-based company had to take remedial action to reline the tanks at three of his forecourts: spending £60,000 at Sussex Service Station, £100,000 on five large tanks at Molineux Service Station in Wolverhampton, and another £12,000 will be spent at its Willenhall site where work is due to be completed next month.
Fortunately, the Top 50 Indie’s remaining forecourts had newer, double lined, tanks which did not need work. And Parekh believes that he has got away lightly despite the business paying for the vehicle repairs to avoid its commercial insurance excess of £2,500. He also lost trade during the disruption with the site not selling fuel for two weeks.
The Texaco site’s unbranded convenience store remained open, but without the fuel business was minimal, says Parekh. As a stop-gap he stopped offering super unleaded petrol and moved the unleaded petrol to that tank while the offending tank was being repaired.
He now wants other petrol filling station operators to take notice of what happened to his business.
“I just want to warn retailers that if the tanks are old they must get them looked at, as the consequences of not doing this is far more expensive. It’s especially the case with unleaded tanks because the ethanol in the fuel is a very corrosive, aggressive substance,” he says. ”The price of doing nothing is unfathomable.”
