The P-I reported earlier today that BP had $20 million of diesel fuel stolen from its Harbor Island facility via a rigged meter, but BP spokesperson Bill Kidd says someone got the math wrong in the police report. “I think someone transposed a zero. We probably said it was something less than $2 million. Our estimate is it’s around $1.2 million, though it’s really hard to tell. It was done at a modest enough rate that it was difficult to pick up,” until the daily variations in inventory, which sometimes show a shortage and sometimes show a surplus, were consistently showing the former.This should come as a relief to anyone worrying about how $20 million of gasoline could go missing without anyone noticing. Said Tim Hamilton, executive director of the Automotive United Trade Organization (a lobby representing independent gas dealers) upon hearing of the alleged $20 million theft, “How in the world did you come up missing 725 truck and trailer loads in diesel in 9 months out of a terminal in an environmentally sensitive area and don’t know it? What if you’d only lost 5 million gallons of diesel into Elliott Bay? At what stage in the game would it have gone over the top of the Ballard Locks. That volume if it was actually missing and it actually leaked, shit, you could ride it with a surfboard.”Kidd says that it’d be hard to detect a leak via the end-of-the-day shortages, but the tanks have an alarm system that goes off if there’s a leak.