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Date: Sun, 25 May 2008 08:23:52 -0400
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From: es39wg@comcast.net
Subject: Jet fuel contamination in 1992 at Chevron

This email was posted by Paul, a chemist at Chevron Richmond.
You may have seen him on TV in the SF Bay Area during some hearings about the Richmond expansion plans.

I am posting this here so that you know what really got into that AvGas.
I also got some and got a new (Zero time) engine from Chevron.
I flew 30 hrs. before I learned of the contamination.  Only that first cross country flight after the small amount of Chevron AvGas was added did I even suspect that anything was wrong.  Not sure it was related to the fuel as I only bought  10 gallons of it.
duane 39wg

[As reported in Light Plane Maintenance, due to one of the avgas tanks being out of service for (frequent) cleaning, a temporary pipe routing was used to connect both delivery points, the barge terminal and the truck terminal, to the one remaining tank. Temporary pipe routing was *also* connected to allow excess unhydrofined kerosine (not yet jet quality) to move to a different tank than normal, due to delays in starting up the jet hydrofiner, a treater that turns kerosine into jet. A double sealed valve between the two sets of pipe routings leaked through, allowing the kerosine into the avgas tank... There`s an alarm system that is supposed to detect this, but it was being repaired that day, and the operator missed the real alarm among all the non- real alarms. Shouldn`t happen, but four abnormal situations in a row hadn`t been considered likely. The product segregation now is even more absolute. Paul]