Boaters rocked by effect of ethanol-laced fuel

"As I reflected on the situation, I thought about the fact that there were never any warnings from the fuel companies that the product they were selling could damage the tank that it was going into," said Turner, a 50-year-old accountant, attorney and diet company president. "What if people pulled up to their local gas station [in their cars] and all of the sudden their gas tank started dissolving?"

A Chevron spokesman said the company hadn't seen the lawsuit and couldn't comment. Shell Oil Co., one of the defendants in the lawsuit, Monday rejected the notion that oil companies were to blame for boat damage caused by ethanol-blended gasoline.

"There were years of advance notification that this change was coming," and ethanol's effect on fiberglass has been known for a long time, Shell President John Hofmeister said Monday while attending a low-carbon fuels conference in Sacramento. "Any boat owner or any boat seller or any boat maintenance shop that didn't know about this impending change and the potential consequences simply wasn't listening or reading."

Turner seeks damages and restitution from the fuel companies. He also wants the case to be given class-action status so other boat owners in California could recoup the cost of ethanol-fuel-related repairs. There are nearly 950,000 pleasure boats registered in the state, but it's unclear how many of those were built with fiberglass tanks and how many might have been damaged by ethanol-blended fuel.

Brian Kabateck, Turner's attorney, said an expert estimated that about 10% of all the boats in California have some sort of fiberglass material used in their tanks. Repair costs could vary dramatically.

Bob Adriance, technical director for the Boat Owners Assn. of the United States, said ethanol's dangers were widely known these days among the group's 650,000 members. But skippers in California and New York, the first states to adopt ethanol-blended gasoline, had to figure it out themselves.

"They really got hammered because they didn't know anything. They just suddenly had filters being clogged, and then, some people not only had to replace their fiberglass tanks, they also had to replace engines," Adriance said. "It can cost tens of thousands of dollars -- more than the boat's worth in many cases."

Adriance said they also were the first to suffer from ethanol's other effects, including its tendency to scour a fuel tank of gums, resins and debris, carrying the gunk into fuel filters. Ethanol also attracts water, and over time, water-laden ethanol can separate from the rest of the gasoline, wreaking havoc with the engine.