Car owners still waiting on reimbursements after pumping contaminated fuel at Colorado gas stations
Friday, Jan. 30, is the deadline for Sinclair Oil to provide the State of Colorado with information on how some gas stations sold gas contaminated with diesel fuel.
Three weeks later, it's still a big inconvenience. State records show that about 1,000 people have filed complaints saying they bought the bad fuel, which caused expensive repairs. Many people are still waiting to get reimbursed.
Lance Strait first spoke to CBS Colorado on Jan. 8, one day after he bought gas from a Parker King Soopers and drove to work without any issues.
"But on the way home, it was sputtering and misfiring and obviously had some serious mechanical issues," said Strait. "I think everybody is in panic mode right now."
Strait was without his car for just over two weeks while the repairs were completed. For one week, he borrowed someone else's car; for another week, he rented one. He finally got his car back on Saturday.
Strait paid for all the repairs and a rental car out of pocket.
"They managed to bring that down to about $3,200 for the repairs, and then you've got car rental, tow service, a few other minor things here and there, so it added up to about $4,000 total," said Strait.
Frank Azar, a personal injury attorney, is now working on a class action lawsuit. He said hundreds of people have reached out to his law firm regarding the situation.
"I've never seen anything like this. No, not on this scale," said Azar, who's been practicing law for over 40 years.
Azar said many of his clients have been asked to sign releases in exchange for reimbursement.
"Please, please don't sign these releases," said Azar, "because you may be leasing your entire claim, and some of these people are doing it."
Azar said signing a release means the company won't be liable for any car problems that may arise later.
"It's just horrendous, and it really is upsetting to me. You may be waiving your rights if you have to go in and redo your fuel injection system. We've had quotes from some service managers up to $16,000," said Azar.
Strait said the process has been confusing and lengthy, but he signed a release on Friday morning.
"The inconvenience is more than anything. Yes, $4,000 is not an insignificant amount of money, but just the headache of having to go through this because of somebody's error," said Strait. "I just want to get paid back for what the repairs are."
He was told it could be up to 14 business days to get reimbursed. Until then, he and many others are hoping for transparency about what happened.
"Just better safeguards, better quality control from the supplier, to where they provide the product," said Strait.
"It seems like a colossal mistake here, made by somebody that's caused a lot of people some serious headaches," Azar said. "We want to know what happened. We're still waiting for the state to finish their investigation, but we'd sure like to know."
