ORLANDO, Fla. -- To see if you're getting what you pay for at local gasoline pumps, Local 6 obtained a statewide database of more than 470,000 gasoline pump inspections since 2005 and looked for the biggest and most frequent discrepancies.
Local 6 found all that stands between you and a cheating gas pump are state inspectors like Bill Masur, who has spent 50 years working with gasoline -- and the last 15 years with the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services.
"It's in my blood," Masur said. "I've been doing it for a long time."
Masur visits hundreds of pumps a month, filling a test vessel until the pump says the consumer is paying for five gallons of gasoline.
If it's within six cubic inches of Masur's test equipment, the pump passes and is tagged with those familiar inspection stickers.
But if the pump is doling out less than that, Masur shuts down the unit and notifies the station owner.
"We tag the pump out of service until they have a service technician come in and repair it," Masur said.
But pumps are inspected just once a year, so a cheating pump can do a lot of damage before Masur can catch it, especially with price approaching $4 a gallon.
Still, despite finding hundreds of pumps violating the rule, the state has not fined any station owners.
The reason is that there is no evidence the owners are deliberately cheating customers.
The pumps, which show no signs of tampering, apparently just malfunction about 3 percent of the time.
The good news is that only 1 percent of pumps are cheating the consumer, and 2 percent are giving more gas than indicated on the pump dial.
The stations listed in the charts that follow were taken from state data involving tests on pumps that were serving the public prior to inspections -- not tests on newly installed pumps.
And they do not show that any of the stations have discrepancies today -- only that they have in the past, dating to Jan 1, 2005.
Gas Stations Group 1 Gas Stations Group 2 Gas Stations Group 3 Gas Stations Group 4 Gas Stations Group 5
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