I know everybody’s worried about gas after Katrina, but after work today it got extremely… Carter adminstration around here. Seriously - they were lined up five and six deep at the pumps, and a lot of gas stations are out of gas now. It seriously reminded me of nothing so much as a run on a bank! Was this a local phenomenon, or was this Black Tuesday for gas stations all over the US?
Well, with gas here rising 60 cents a gallon from one day to the next, you’d be well advised to fill your tank today, instead of waiting for what tomorrow may bring. With the media predicting $4.00 a gallon before long, you should probably be filling every legal container you have with the stuff.
There was some kind of email hoax about stations running out of gas, I read somewhere. Might become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/08/31/national/main806735.shtml
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/08/31/ap/business/mainD8CB461O1.shtml
New Jersey is calm, but we have huge tank farms and lots of refineries. I guess we’ll be among the least affected.
I got three calls this afternoon telling me the gas stations were closing at 4. I filled up yesterday and haven’t gone out today so I don’t know if they did or not. The owner of my regular station told me yesterday he was low on gas because his delivery truck hadn’t arrived.
It cost me over $38 to fill up a Wrangler. Ouch!
It was pretty crowded this afternoon, but only at the place with cheap gas. The place charging $3.05 had no takers.
(And then it turned out that the next town over was 20 cents cheaper than the cheap place in my town. Arggh.)
I filled up yesterday morning at $2.59/gal. Knowing that it would go up a lot today. Went to $3.09 all over Northeast OH this AM.
But, a friend just called tonight, who lives right here, and said they ran out and filled up because they heard on news that it was $6/gal in Atlanta.
Panic time.
Does anyone remember in the late 1969-1971 period when there was a run on toilet paper? I shit you not. You would go to the store and there was NONE. Self-fulfiling prophecy.
Regular is going for $3.19 here in Nowhere, Indiana.
All three gas stations in my small town had long waiting lines this afternoon. I didn’t need gas, but wanted a can of diesel fuel. No diesel was available, the pumps were wrapped in brown bags, the tanks empty.
Regular gas was 2.69, up from 2.53 yesterday.
A friend of mine called me from metro Atlanta a couple of hours ago and said they were gassing up for $2.99/gallon and there were no lines, but here in NC I’m hearing reports that the mountains are out of gas entirely and many stations in Raleigh are running out of 87 unleaded. And as Squink posted, we have been asked by the Governor to conserve gas as much as possible. So glad I gassed up yesterday before all the stations here in Greensboro bumped up their prices to well over $3/gallon! Also glad I had no plans to go anywhere over the long weekend. Just gonna sit tight with some Netflix movies and only venture out to check the mail and skateboard the parking lot. 
By golly, I just invoked that story today. It happened right after I moved to Denver–I saw people walking out of the local stores with BIG BAGS of toilet paper and thought, WTF? Somebody said, “Oh, there’s gonna be a shortage.”
Well yeah. When everybody buys 10 times as much as they would normally the stores deplete pretty quickly. The only thing left on the shelves was generic (i.e., a little too soft to type on).
(
I live in Atlanta. As a matter of fact, the gas is about $4 right now. We happen to have the busiest BP in the entire nation in Midtown and after a panic this evening, the station was closed. Just think, the busiest BP in the nation, closed…
Saw 2.79/gallon on the way home last night. No lines, not even a crowd at the pumps. I pass about a half-dozen gas stations on my commute. Saw nothing out of the ordinary.
Has anyone heard if the president intends to release any tp from the Strategic Ass-wipe Supply?
Don’t know about anywhere else, but here in Hartford, CT prices for premium are actually down four cents from yesterday, at $2.959. Regular is at $2.75, I think.
Definitely higher than normal, but there were no lines, and no stations seem out of gas.
I’m about a half-hour outside Atlanta and the lines yesterday were ridiculous. I heard from a co-worker that they passed a place charging $5.99/gallon. Thankfully, I usually fill up on Tuesdays and only live 2.9 miles from work.
About the tp hijack, I recall hearing that it started with a joke in a Johnny Carson monologue about a tp shortage based on a minor story he read. IIRC, the Pentagon was running short because they were taking bids on a new tp supplier contract and the old contract had already run out.
Peace - DESK