First day on my own and I cross dropped.

Hey, at least you didn’t drop diesel in there. Stuff happens to the best of us.

 

I was filling up at the Petro in Wilmington, IL. I got about 50 gallons in when I noticed a strong smell of gasoline. I cut the pump off and didn’t finish filling it.

I’m guessing it wasn’t contaminated too bad because I didn’t seize an injector before I made it to another place to finish filling it.

 

Everybody makes mistakes, and no one got hurt, so it's not all bad.
At training, it was suggested that we circle the product and destination, after verifying it was correct. That's been helping me. I caught an over load of diesel that way. Diesel is heavier, so we only load 7500 gallons, 8600 for gas. I made a mistake calculating in my head how much to put in each compartment, and loaded 8600 diesel. Fortunately I caught it on the BOL, and the first drop was only a couple blocks from the refinery. I still ended up hitting the overflow ball, and locking on, but was able to get the hose drained, and the rest went to the second drop.
Hang in there, you just learned a valuable lesson. I bet you won't do it again.

 

Did you mess up? Yes but you also caught that mess up. I'm the company understands. But if you had messed up and did not catch it. Then cost them big time. Different story.
Your like the rest of us. Learn fast when we screw up. When I was pulling a tanker. Had just dropped a loaded Methanol tanker. Pulled around to get my Empty 10 WT tanker to head back out. Driver was hooking up to my loaded I had just dropped. I went over and caught him before he could get out of the yard. Asked him why in the world he was hooked to the loaded trailer?
He was leading back to get it loaded again. Asked him why in the world he could not tell it was loaded? His only answer was I don't know... Company fired him the next week. He had hooked up to a empty brake fluid tanker. Took it to Mud Island and tried to load it with Methanol. But they laughed at him and turned him away.
Good luck and triple check and be safe.
Pete

 

I was about to say the same thing. Just a few days ago...

Gas station's fuel mix-up proving costly for customers​

I'm a little fuzzy on how you could load the wrong product though. When I last hauled fuel (admittedly more than 25 years ago... 25 years! ) we had to enter driver code, load code, retailer code and product code at the rack. All loads and products were pre-ordered and selected. So, the only thing we could do wrong at the rack is put the product in the wrong compartment. I am just a little surprised that 25 years later and it's possible to load the wrong product. Seems like the system needs updating.

Of course we could offload in the wrong tank at the destination, but that isn't what you did.

 

I was looking at a pretty woman who kept looking at me and I lost focus with which compartment I was hooking my hose to. I mistakenly hooked to regular and dumped into premium hole. It was 2nd week solo after training. Same thing it had to be pumped out, major internal safety write up and violation. Now I walk back and forth checking the lids and compartments twice before pulling the trigger.

 

We have these nylon/velcro straps to wrap around the heads to denote a different product in that compartment. A little reminder that it needs to go in a different hole. This one is just orange, I also have a lime green one that says "diesel" on it. I'm not sure what they're called, or where to get them.
Found them; Hook and Loop Straps, Products

 

You've got me beat. I at least waited 2 months before I dropped 3200 gallons of leaded regular into the super tank. I also had to call the boss at 3:30am and tell him. They didn't fire me and I retired from that company with only one contam. If you're good they will keep the driver that they spent all the money on to train. Now you know the humbling events that go along with gasoline hauling and I'm sure you won't do anything like that for some time now.