The Silence of Broken Engines: Why Does No One Foot the Bill?

Since mid-September, engines have been breaking down after a full tank of gasoline. The harm has its victims; it has yet to find anyone responsible. This vacuum is no accident: it is the very shape of our petroleum market.

The mechanic laid the bill on the hood with a delicacy I will not forget, the way one lays down a death certificate. Three thousand fifty-two dollars. He did not talk about bad luck or wear and tear. He said: “It’s the gas. You’re not the first this week.” Then he shrugged, that gesture we all know, which means that the fault lies somewhere but no one will come looking for it.

Indeed, I am not the first. Since the weekend of 11 to 13 September, motorcycle-taxi drivers, tap-tap owners, and motorists in the metropolitan region have been reporting breakdowns shortly after refueling: engines that will not start, loss of power, engines that have to be opened up. The Ministry of Commerce and Industry responded with a public notice dated 15 September, calling for calm and opening a complaints platform. Inspectors took samples at a few stations on the 18th. Motorcyclists’ unions announced a three-day strike. As I write, no test results have been made public.

This piece does not go back over the events of those days. It seeks to understand why such visible harm still has no perpetrator. We must first explain what bad fuel does to an engine, then follow the product from ship to pump to see where responsibility dissolves. We will then see that the state has a laboratory that measures liters very well and quality not at all, and that some players in the sector win at both ends of the chain. Finally, because anger without a plan repairs no engine, specific measures will follow.

Three thousand dollars, and the other bill

My bill is steep. It is not the steepest.

For me, three thousand dollars means pain, a hole in a budget, a project postponed. For the motorcycle driver who works fare by fare on the Route de Delmas, a seized piston means something else: no income at all for as long as it takes to scrape together the money for the part, and that time is counted in skipped meals. The motorcycle is his capital, his tool, often his only asset. When it breaks down, a small business goes bankrupt without anyone recording it in a statistic.

We have to face it: defective fuel is a regressive tax. It hits everyone, but it takes more from those who have less, because they ride older, more fragile machines, repaired in workshops where original parts do not exist. The owner of a recent vehicle pays dearly; the motorcyclist pays with his week.

What an engine swallows

A gasoline engine is a machine of a precision we tend to forget. The mixture of air and fuel must ignite at the exact moment the spark plug commands, not a fraction of a second earlier. The octane rating measures precisely the gasoline’s ability to resist spontaneous ignition under pressure. When this rating is too low for the engine, the mixture detonates on its own, too early, in jolts. That is the knocking that mechanics recognize by ear. Repeated thousands of times a minute, it hammers the pistons, wears out the rings, and can punch a hole through a piston crown. Modern engines compensate for a while by retarding the ignition, at the cost of power. Older engines, and most motorcycles, compensate for nothing.

Octane is only one of the ways to get fuel wrong. Gasoline laden with water, sediment, or gums from a product that has aged or been poorly stored clogs filters, fouls injectors, and attacks the fuel pump. A product cut with solvents or heavy fractions burns poorly and leaves deposits. The unusual smell drivers complain about is not proof in itself. It is a symptom, and a symptom shared by hundreds of people in the same neighborhoods, on the same days, stops being an impression and becomes a clue.

That is why the ministry’s caution, legitimate in substance, rings false in form. No one is asking the ministry to reach conclusions without testing. It is being asked why the testing did not exist before the engines broke down.

From ship to pump, a chain with no responsible link

Let us follow the product. A tanker arrives with a cargo accompanied by a certificate of quality issued at the port of loading. The fuel is unloaded into the tanks of the Varreux terminal, where it is sometimes mixed with earlier stocks. Trucks carry it to the stations. At every stage, the product can be degraded: by a certificate of convenience at the outset, by the mixing of batches, by a poorly maintained tank, by dilution at the station. Four links, four alibis. The importer cites his certificate, the terminal cites the product it received, the distributor cites the terminal, the pump attendant cites the distributor.

A serious inspection system exists precisely to break this game of finger-pointing. It takes samples at unloading, keeps sealed samples of every batch, compares them with the certificate, and can thus say, on the day an engine breaks down, at which link the product changed. Without this memory, any investigation is like an autopsy performed without a body.

That is exactly what the September sequence reveals. On the 17th, the Advisory Council for Monitoring the Petroleum Market wrote to the minister asking for the inspection and analysis certificates for gasoline shipments from 1 August to 15 September, and for new samples to be taken from the Varreux tanks. The request is fair. It is also terrible in what it implies: if those certificates had been checked on arrival, it would be enough to publish them. A union official asserts, for his part, that aviation kerosene is tested on unloading, with no equivalent arrangement for the gasoline sold to motorists. If this is confirmed, the picture is cruel: we protect the planes; we abandon the motorcycles.

On 18 September, some ten inspectors visited four or five stations in the metropolitan region. The visit deserves credit, and its scope deserves to be weighed. Sampling at the pump records an end state. It can prove that a product is bad; it says almost nothing about where it went bad, especially several days after the first breakdowns, when the tanks have been filled, emptied, and filled again.

The laboratory that measures liters

These days, many are demanding that the metrology laboratory deliver a verdict. It is worth knowing what it is.

The National Metrology Laboratory, attached to the Haitian Bureau of Standards and inaugurated by the ministry in December 2012, maintains the national standards of mass, volume, and temperature. It guarantees that a kilo is a kilo and a gallon is a gallon. Its staff, together with the legal metrology service, check the accuracy of fuel dispensers at the stations. It is useful work: it protects against the “pump trick,” the fraud of charging for more liters than are delivered, which drivers were already complaining about in June.

But this laboratory does not measure octane. It does not detect water in gasoline, or sulfur, or gums. The ministry all but admitted as much in its notice of 15 September, announcing that it might “seek the technical support of accredited bodies” to carry out the tests. In other words, the Haitian state knows how to check the quantity of what it allows to be sold; it does not know how to check its nature.

There is a symbol here that I cannot bring myself to find trivial. We have built the instrument that protects the transaction, not the one that protects the user. We make sure the customer really gets five gallons; what those five gallons contain is a matter of trust. Yet trust, in a concentrated market with no inspection and no penalties, is not a virtue. It is a subsidy granted to the seller.

Winning at both ends

A market works when whoever causes damage bears its cost. Here, it is the reverse. The importer who brings in a cargo of mediocre quality paid less for it; the price difference is his immediate gain. The damage, meanwhile, is scattered across thousands of fuel tanks, spread out over time, and impossible to link to a specific batch for lack of traceability. Each victim, on his own, carries too little weight to go to court, and could not prove anything anyway. The cost is real and massive, but it never comes back to the one who caused it. Economists call this an externality; the motorcycle driver calls it his lost week.

The structure of the market makes the problem worse. In a territory as small as ours, the same business groups are often found at several levels of the same supply chain: fuel imports, vehicle dealerships, parts sales, repair shops. I am not claiming that an importer deliberately poisons the gasoline in order to sell engines. That argument would be too convenient, and it is not needed. It is enough to note that when the defective product and the repair of its effects benefit neighboring interests, no one in the chain has a strong reason to spend money on quality. A conflict of interest does not need intent to produce its effects; all it needs is to run into no rule.

That, at bottom, is what offends. This country has long known low-octane gasoline, the kind that wears engines down quietly, slowly, and that people put up with as they would with the weather. Years ago, this newspaper was already running headlines saying that the state was buying poor-quality fuel and that dealers were replacing engines after three years. What is new in September is not mediocrity. It is the crossing of a threshold: the product no longer ages engines, it kills them. And the response is the same as ever: the victims are asked to be patient.

The law exists; the state leaves it unarmed

It would be wrong to say that we lack legal texts. The decree of 11 March 2020 on the safety of goods and services, fairness in economic transactions, and consumer protection exists. Its Article 16 provides for measures against non-compliance, and the ministry has pointed this out. The minister has even promised that the results of the investigation would be published, that administrative sanctions would follow, and that the courts should take up the matter.

All of this is true, and all of it runs up against the same impossibility: you cannot penalize a non-compliance you are unable to establish, and you cannot establish it without samples taken at the right place, at the right time, and kept under rules that will stand up to a lawyer. A law without a laboratory is a promise. A complaints platform without a body of evidence is a register of sorrows.

What must be done

The ministry has made a first move. What is missing must now be built, and part of it can be done in weeks, not years.

First, publish without delay the quality certificates for every cargo of gasoline and diesel unloaded since 1 August: name of the ship, date, port of loading, issuing laboratory, declared octane rating. These documents exist, or should exist. Publishing them costs nothing and will, on its own, say a great deal.

Second, make witnessed sampling mandatory for every shipment at unloading in Varreux, in the presence of a state official and a representative of the Advisory Council, with analysis by an independent laboratory before the fuel is released for distribution. Until the result is known, the batch stays in the tank. That is the rule the world over; there is nothing exotic about applying it here.

Third, introduce retained samples. Every batch unloaded leaves behind a sealed, numbered flask, kept for at least ninety days. Every delivery note to a station carries the batch number. On the day an engine breaks down, we know where the fuel came from and have something to compare it with. Traceability is not a bureaucratic formula: it is what turns a complaint into proof.

Fourth, give the state a real means of analysis. Two paths complement each other. Immediately, a framework contract with an accredited laboratory in the region, able to deliver results within a few days. In the short term, equipping inspectors with portable analyzers, which measure octane and detect certain contaminants right at the pump, at a cost that is modest compared with a single cargo. The National Metrology Laboratory would keep its mission, which is the accurate measurement of volumes; quality would at last have its own instruments.

Fifth, publish a Haitian fuel specification standard, with numerical thresholds for octane, sulfur, water, and sediment, and make it legally enforceable. A product that does not meet it does not come in. If such a standard already exists, let it be posted at every station, next to the price.

Sixth, and this is the decisive point, shift the cost of the damage onto whoever can avoid it. When an analysis establishes that a batch is non-compliant, the importer’s liability should be presumed for the damage found in vehicles refueled with that batch during the period in question, with the burden on him to prove that the degradation occurred downstream. A compensation fund, financed by a contribution of a few cents per gallon paid by importers, would make it possible to pay small owners quickly, then to seek recourse against the party at fault. Nothing changes behavior faster than a bill returned to its sender.

Seventh, require declarations of interests. Every fuel-importing company should declare its stakes in vehicle sales, parts sales, and repairs. Not in order to prohibit, but so that the regulator knows where to look and the public knows whom it is dealing with.

Finally, consumers are not unarmed, provided they pick those weapons up. Keep the receipt for every fill-up. Note the station and the time. When a breakdown occurs, ask the garage to keep a sample from the tank in a clean, sealed container, and submit it, together with the written diagnosis, through the ministry’s platform. The consumer associations and transport unions now demanding the results of the investigation could take up these cases together, because a thousand documented complaints carry a different weight from scattered anger.

The sound of a dying engine

I think back to the mechanic’s shrug. It did not express indifference; it expressed habit. We have learned to live with products that deceive us, pumps that cheat, prices we do not understand, and we have ended up mistaking resignation for a form of wisdom.

Yet there comes a moment when habit cracks. The sound of a dying engine is a very particular sound: metallic, irregular, like a cough. Thousands of Haitians have heard it this month. If that sound produces nothing (no published analysis, no identified batch, no one held responsible through a formal procedure rather than by rumor), then the lesson the market will draw is simple: you can sell anything here, and the customer will pay twice.

The promised results may come. They will say whether the product was bad. The question that will remain open is of another kind, and I am not sure we are ready to answer it: how many more engines will it take for a country to decide to know what it puts in its tanks?