The Editor, Sir:

I have a query. Just who oversees our gas stations? Late afternoon Sunday, July 6, as I was heading from my home at Spot Valley to Montego Bay, where I had an evening function, I noticed that the air in one of my tyres was rather low. I decided to stop at the nearest gas station to have it pumped up.

Would you believe that not one of the four gas stations (I refuse to call them service stations) on the highway between my home near Rose Hall and Montego Bay, including the one at the Sangster International Airport, had a working air pump? At the airport, friends changed my now nearly flat tire for the spare, and I headed off on the Howard Cooke Highway only to discover that the next two stations had no working pump either.

Finally, at the seventh station at Westgate, I was helped by a kind security guard to put air in my spare tyre. SEVEN gas stations before I could get air! Surely it should be mandatory for gas stations to have working air pumps? So many of our roads are in poor condition and tyres suffer badly on them. This is such a basic service and any service station worth the name should offer it. It is dangerous enough for people to travel without this additional worry.

I am, etc.,

JANE CRICHTON

gjanecrichton@yahoo.com