If you're looking for a quick, fairly easy investigation that will grab the interest of readers, then checking out the accuracy of gasoline pumps is the one for you. The project, which took me only about a week to do (and I spent most of that negotiating and waiting for a copy of a state database) came about after a string of stories about how gasoline prices had dropped significantly nearly everywhere except Utah.
While the governor launched another investigation of the high prices, we decided to look at whether customers really receive what they pay for at the pump. We began our investigation with a quick search on the state's Web site, www.utah.gov, which showed us that the Division of Weights and Measures in the Department of Agriculture and Food had the data we needed. The Web site mentioned that the division tests "all gasoline pumps for accurate measurement." (I also could have found that by simply looking more closely on the inspection stickers that the division places on each gasoline pump in the state.) The state provided me a full copy of its Microsoft Access database on a CD, and it already had some state-designed queries saved on it, such as "total pumps failed with location and count," which made my life far too easy.
A major drawback with the Utah database is that it did not include whether a "volume failure" occurred because a pump gave too much gasoline or too little. However, the inspection supervisor and other inspectors agreed that nearly half of the time the failed pumps gave too much, and half the time they gave too little. I had most of the numbers and information that I needed from the database in about an hour.
Some simple division of the number of pumps that failed (1,898) by the total pumps inspected (44,796) gave the overall failure rate (4.2 percent). Division of the number of stations with at least one failed pump (92) by the number of total stations (1,140) gave the failure rate for stations (8 percent). I did some sorting by station and inspection date to discover that many stations had all their pumps fail repeatedly in up to five inspections over two years.
Sorting by city, I also found that some of the state's biggest cities did not have any failing pumps, while some smaller cities had numerous failures. Finally, sorting and counting by date showed that virtually all known stations had been inspected in 2005, but inspections appeared to be way down in 2006. Some of our findings: Customers in Utah have a 1-in-25 chance of buying gasoline at a pump that fails to give amounts within legal ranges.
About half of the pumps that fail give too little gasoline, and half give too much. So, motorists have about a 1-in-50 chance of getting more than they paid for, and 1-in-50 odds of getting less. About 8 percent of gas stations in Utah had at least one pump that failed from January 2005 through August 2006. They were scattered among 92 stations in 43 communities. Some stations had all of their pumps fail repeatedly in multiple inspections.
However, the state issued no fines and closed no pumps or stations at that time. The state inspected all of the state's gasoline stations in 2005 but now has decided to inspect only about one-third of them each year. It has only eight inspectors, and they do a variety of other work, including checking scales and price scanners at stores statewide. The state said that other work had been suffering. Once I had my information from the database, I interviewed state officials and industry representatives.
A photographer and I went with a state inspector to a local gas station to see and describe how inspections occur. We also found some interesting tidbits along the way. The inspector told us that pumps always give a little more gasoline when it is pumped quickly instead of slowly, so now I am sure that all of our readers pump gas as quickly as possible. State officials also say pumps are designed so that as they wear out they should err in favor of consumers.
I also suspect that readers started looking for older pumps. We put a list online of all stations that had at least one pump fail. It showed the dates of inspections and how many pumps failed each time. We arranged that by city to make it easier for readers to identify nearby stations.