That reminds me of something that happened in North Bay, a city about 3.5 hours from Toronto.
A lot of houses here in Canada still heat with heating oil. These houses have large oil tanks inside of their basements the size of upright pianos.
On the outside of the houses are two pipes, one is for filling the tank, and the other is to let off pressure.
Many of these houses, that were once oil heated, have converted to natural gas, with a retro fit burner unit.
One sunny winter morning a young driver for ESSO petrolium got a call to fill an oil tank.
it seems that the address he got, shared a driveway with another house. In other words, the two driveways were side by side, with no fence in between.
The truck pulled up, and the driver went to the house and rang the bell. No one answered. So, he walked back to the truck, and hooked up his hoses, to the pipe on the outside of the house.
He then started filling.
Since the hose had an automatic shut off, he tilted his head back in the truck, and took a nap.
Half an hour later, he woke up, and the truck was still pumping, which was strange since it was usually a five minute deal.
Then he saw the oil spewing from a basement window.
It seems he went to the neighbor instead of the right house. The house he filled, no longer had an oil tank or oil furnace.
I can't remember how much ESSO had to pay, but I do know, that the whole house had to be bulldozed, and the earth in the entire lot had to be trucked away. Plus they had dumped a ton of oil into the city sewer through the floor drains. |
