Gas siphoning rises with prices

On a recent morning, Gary VanDyk walked outside to go to work and saw the gas flap on his car was open. The cap was on the ground, and his tank was empty.

VanDyk, who works as a manager at Napa Auto Parts in St. Petersburg, knew high gas prices were driving more theft. It had happened to delivery trucks at his store.

But he wasn't expecting it to happen at his home in Seminole. Turns out, several of his neighbors were hit, too.

"If people need gas bad enough, they're going to take it no matter how they can get it," VanDyk said.

With gas hovering around $4 a gallon, drivers are more pressed than ever to come up with money to get around. Auto parts stores say they're selling more locking gas caps to protect against gas siphoning.

Shawn Badgley, manager of Advance Auto Parts in St. Petersburg, recently sold about 30 caps to a roofing company manager to use on his fleet of trucks. Badgley outfitted his own delivery trucks with the caps, which run about $15 to $20, after someone siphoned gas from them overnight.

"When the gas prices got over $3.60 is when the gas caps really starting coming off the shelves," Badgley said.

Stant Manufacturing, the largest locking gas cap maker in the United States, says it invented the product during the Great Depression because of the high rate of gas theft.

Sales have more than tripled since gas prices started escalating this year, said Chris Hoffman, product marketing manager.

"As we saw the gas starting to spike, we started increasing our inventories," Hoffman said. "We're actually in pretty good shape."

Factory-built features on cars also have made gas theft trickier. Many new cars have gas flaps that only open when a lever is pulled on the inside of the car.

Some vehicles have a safety device in the gas pipe called a baffle that prevents gas from leaking out in a crash. It also makes it harder to stick a siphon hose into the gas tank.

But the persistent have found ways. Police nationwide have reported cases in which thieves punctured gas tanks to drain out the gas. In Lakeland, a 70-year-old man was charged with theft after police said he pumped more than 900 gallons of gasoline from underground storage tanks last fall.

Last week in Arkansas, a homeowner shot a man stealing gas from a car, injuring him in the arm and leg.

Sgt. Kevin Smith, who heads the Economic Crimes Unit of the St. Petersburg Police Department, said gas siphoning can be hard to investigate because witnesses are rare. He said the department got its first reports of gas siphoning last week. Police in Tampa haven't had any.

At gas stations, drive-offs aren't much of an issue, said Jim Smith, president and chief executive officer of the Florida Petroleum Marketers and Convenience Store Association. When prices rise, stations make less money (profit per gallon stays the same but credit card fees cost more). As a result, few stations will let customers pay after they pump.

"Seventy dollars per fill-up?" Smith said. "That's a lot of money, particularly when you're not making anything."

In St. Petersburg, police have had only about half a dozen reports of drive-offs this year. In Hillsborough County, commissioners in 2005 required drivers to pay before they pump after the sheriff complained that his deputies were spending too much time chasing fuel thieves.

Times researcher Will Gorham and staff writer Tom Kaplan contributed to this report. Stephanie Garry can be reached at (727) 892-2374 or sgarry@sptimes.com.