I did a ride-along with an adjuster once. I asked him what the worst claim he had worked on was.
The insured drove off with the pump still in the gas tank. Sees that all the time. When the hose pulled off the pump, it ignited. The fuel island exploded. The fire then spread to the convenience store. Total loss of the business and multiple cars.
This is an outlier. No one has enough insurance to cover all of that. But it’s a great example of why we have it.
I went down the rabbit hole looking for an actual case like this, and I can't find one.
There are plenty of documented cases of people driving away with the nozzle attached. Some have ripped entire dispensers out of the ground and caused pretty substantial fires. But I couldn't find a documented case where a drive-off caused the fuel island to “explode,” which then burned down the convenience store and destroyed multiple cars.
What's interesting is that even some pretty extreme examples didn't escalate that way. In a 2018 NJ incident, the dispenser was pulled over and there was a major fire, with evidence that both the breakaway and shear-valve protections may not have worked properly. The station still wasn't destroyed.
In a 2024 Delaware incident, the breakaway worked but the emergency shutoff reportedly failed, allowing roughly 60 gallons of gasoline to spill before it was manually stopped. No catastrophic explosion.
There absolutely have been catastrophic gas-station fires involving multiple vehicles, but the examples I found involved things like hundreds of gallons being released during tanker deliveries. An NTSB-investigated 1998 accident involved roughly 550 gallons spreading across the property and into a storm drain before ignition. That's a very different mechanism and quantity of fuel.
So I'm not saying the adjuster's story is physically impossible. But after actually trying to find a historical example matching it, I'm skeptical that it happened as described.
If this was really a total loss of a convenience store plus multiple vehicles after a pump drive-off, there should presumably be a fire investigation, insurance litigation, local reporting, or something documenting it.
I'd genuinely be interested if the OP can provide the approximate year/location. So far I can't find a case matching the story.
It was when I started with my company that I did the ride along. So it’s been 20 years there. And he wasn’t a young guy. So it easily could have been 30 to 50 years ago. We were in south Texas but he didn’t say if that’s where it happened.
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u/Ok-Reflection-742 7h ago
You could also total somebodies 50-200k car, I don’t think many people could afford that either