Las Vegas police busted a homemade gas station in a local backyard.

Even at legal service stations, gasoline must be handled with care, as its vapors are extremely flammable.

People die tapping and stealing gas. Please don't make a gas station in your backyard.

Las Vegas police have found a “ homemade gas station ” in someone’s backyard. With two fuel tanks, a fuel pump, and a hose long enough to reach the street, it would be hard to claim this was anything other than an illegal fuel business.

It’s not clear if this gas was stolen, although it probably was; police seem more concerned in the immediate sense about the wild danger of an above-ground, unregulated fuel reservoir. Each tank appears to be made of plastic and with a volume of maybe 20 cubic feet. Since gas is at its most flammable in vapor form, an evaporating spill or leak is more dangerous than just fuel held in a closed container. But anytime you move or disturb gasoline, you’re increasing the likelihood of an incident.

And gas theft is wildly common. Setting up a full backyard gas station with a whole pump is some next-level stuff, but the Las Vegas police busted a ring of 25 gas thieves just last year. They used stolen credit cards to make enormous gas purchases, filling up vehicle fuel tanks, extra tanks hidden inside the vehicles, and specially outfitted rental vans.

Those thieves were, in turn, operating their own home gasoline business. In 2017, a Las Vegas man found a gas thief siphoning 10 gallons from his small truck into a tank. If the usual gas can holds one or two gallons, something to hold 10 gallons isn't just intentional, but dangerous. Would you want to worry about safety while carrying 80 pounds of gasoline?

Winona Ryder’s character in the Gen-X classic Reality Bites was a trailblazer of the gas scam, using a station credit card to buy gas and having people reimburse her with cash. But real gas theft is way less clever and way more dangerous, like an explosion in 2019 that killed well over 100 people who were gathered to take fuel from a tap on a pipeline in Mexico. That pipeline is frequently targeted by organized crime, and fuel theft and sales is a growing part of their portfolio. The fire spread fast and took hours to extinguish.

The thefts in Las Vegas probably aren’t linked with traditional organized crime, but 25 people working together is certainly organized at least a little. Around the world, oil and fuel theft is rampant, especially in places where long stretches of pipeline are unattended. But thieves can drill into accessible fuel tanks on big rigs with tanks of up to 50 gallons or more, or even large heavy-duty pickup trucks with up to 37.5 or more gallons.

New advances in sensor technology as part of the internet of things (IoT) could help curb fuel theft, although it will still take time for security workers to get to where people are tapping fuel. In your backyard gas station, dispensing fuel in extreme heat (like ... Las Vegas?) is a new danger every time you do it, especially as fuel reserves decrease and leave more empty space to fill with explosive vapor. An expert said even a hot water heater can ignite gasoline vapors.

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