USA TODAY International Edition
Gasoline shortages loom as Florence targets East Coast
Stations running low as many try to flee storm
With Hurricane Florence barreling toward the East Coast, motorists in North Carolina are rushing to fuel up their vehicles at gasoline stations.
Evacuations of coastal communities in the state have already spawned shortages, according to fuel-station finding app GasBuddy.
Stations in portions of South Carolina and Virginia could also experience a rush of drivers trying to fill up as the storm approaches.
While analysts don’t expect widespread shortages, motorists are on high alert after hurricanes caused temporary outages at stations in parts of Florida and Texas in 2017.
“You are seeing panic behavior by motorists,” said Tom Kloza, analyst at Oil Price Information Service.
Nationally, analysts don’t expect Florence to cause a spike in gas prices – in part because refining capacity, much of which is concentrated in the Gulf Coast, is unlikely to be affected. Prices averaged $2.84 nationally on Tuesday, according to AAA. That was up 1 cent from a week earlier.
To be sure, the critical Colonial Pipeline carries more than 1 million barrels of gasoline per day from Texas and Louisiana to the East Coast. Any temporary outages due to flooding could cause some disruption. But Kloza said that most of the Colonial Pipeline is located “well inland.”
Outages could eventually occur at more than 10 percent of stations across North Carolina, predicted Patrick DeHaan, GasBuddy senior petroleum analyst. “In the next day, stations will be overwhelmed,” he said.
But he urged drivers not to fret about long-term problems. One key reason: The East Coast region that Florence is expected to affect doesn’t have much gasoline refining capacity. So even if the area gets hard hit, gasoline supplies will be available from other states.
Analysts don’t expect widespread shortages like in Florida last year. At one point during Hurricane Irma in 2017, more than 40 percent of stations there were out of fuel. The state faced a confluence of forces that sparked outages, including barges temporarily unable to access the state and truck drivers sidelined due to dangerous conditions.
During these types of situations, the problem is the mad dash to fuel up causes short-term grief.
“It’s like a church on Easter Sunday,” Kloza said. “The church can’t handle the crowd on Easter Sunday, but it can handle the crowd 364 days a year. So that’s what we’ll see now.”
One fear is that gas stations will resort to gouging. But analysts said gouging rarely occurs due to government oversight, the threat that station owners will lose their franchise agreements and the fact that most stations can’t afford to scare people away from buying more profitable products inside the store.