Other states are not having this problem. Why the hell aren't they trucking in additional gas from other locations to make up the shortfall?

And why wasn't this done when the problem started?

I live in Atlanta, and lemme tell ya - the whole thing is ridiculous. You have to wait at least an hour to get gas, because everybody and their sister wants to fill that 1/4 of a tank that they're missing up as soon as they see a gas station that actually HAS gas.

I've been trying to drive as little as possible and only fill up when I really need it.

I got gas the other night because I had to, and people are insane... like the lady six cars back in line who tried to get the station manager to make me wait so she could get in first, because she "deserves it more" (her words). Was she running on empty? Oh no. She still had half a tank.

Utter stupidity.

@starrion: At this point, it's mainly stupid people panicking that's causing most of the problem. If people would stop jumping at every gas station they see, things still wouldn't be perfect - but they'd be a hell of a lot better around here.

@starrion: The original reason extra gas wasn't trucked in in the beginning is b/c Georgia (or maybe just ATL) has smog requirements for the gas, so they can't give us just anything. Gov. Perdue lifted that restriction, but it was too late and now people are hoarding and it's just insane.

stories like this don't help. Who cares what a "Rice University Expert" thinks about how long it will last? What point does the story have except to cause people to continue to fill up when they have 1/2 - 3/4 tank? I dread the stories that will start warning that the FDIC is insolvent, causing bank runs that make it so.

I don't buy this "hoarding" argument for gas. Whether you buy half a tank on Monday and again on Wednesday, or a full tank on Wednesday, you've still bought almost the same amount of gas by Wednesday (almost, because of the wait on monday that can be avoided). Are you guys really buying the idea that people spending an extra half gallon of gas by waiting for gas is seriously making this mess? As for me, I think your elected leaders, rather than taking the blame for not coming up with a solution, are blaming their own constituents.

Sure, there's some people filling up one or two five gallon gas containers, but surely this adds up to less gas than everyone buys during the summer to power their mowers and ATVs, drive for vacations, etc.

Up here in Pennsylvania, I continue to fill my tank whenever it gets down to 1/2 full because I was taught that running a car down to nearly empty is bad for the gas level sensor and the engine.

Lastly, if it's that difficult to find gas, then one _shouldn't_ let the tank go down to less than half a tank, so that you have a safety reserve for emergencies. If you need to pick your child up from school, go to the hospital for an emergency, or get to work on a day that there's no gas, you'll be able to do so.

@jblack: The 20 gallons of gas I'm storing in my garage beg to differ. Finally, a good investment, I;m a financial genius
*loud explosion*
Ooooorr not.

the hoarding argument is getting pretty silly at this point... save for the handful of true crazies who rushed out and bought 5 gallon containers and filled them up and shoved them in their garage (I've not seen this happen BUT I'm pre-epting any 'yeah buts'), people can only "hoarde" as much as their gas tank size allows them to do.

A necessary requirement for hoarding is you have a warehouse to place your hoarde... and while human hoarding may have been an explanation in the first few days, its lost its explanatory power.

@lamorevincera: There's a lot of truth to that comment. A few weeks back when the impending supply shortage was imminent, my wife and I were discussing the ramifications of the news carrying the story. We agreed that it would only hurt things, with people panicking and buying gas without any real need. The effects of this are twofold:
1) Gas sales exceed supply forecasting, causing a quicker shortfall than otherwise expected by normal use patterns, and
2) The increased artificial demand coupled with the real and sudden supply shortage inflate the price of any gasoline remaining to be sold.

It's funny (not funny ha-ha, mind you) that for months, all people have been doing is complaining about high gas prices. Now they can't seem to get enough of it.

I started looking for gas when I hit a quarter tank, and came up dry until today at a hair above empty, and even then it's only somewhat of a hit since I had to put 89 octane in my car that requires 91.

I live in one of places were gas in short. At first I thought- hey, listen to the "experts" and don't buy gas until I need it. Guess what? When I really need it, no one has it or the lines are 2 hours long. So, yeah, when I get less than half a tank, my eyes start paying more attention to gas stations and whether they have gas or not. You can see a gas station with gas in the morning and by the afternoon, they are all gone.

We had been promised repeatedly that they were sending very large loads to our area and trucking it in from other areas. It didn't do much. Then I read today that the large shipment had arrived, but the supplier decided not to release a lot of it. No wonder the "gas crisis" is continuing.

Every reason is good to jack the prices. I do not want to sound like conspiracy theorist, but what reason is there exactly for the oil companies to fix the pipeline? We have a winner ;-)

Seriously though, the arguments about people topping off the tanks is downright silly. I drive a civic (30 mpg the way I go), have modest drive to work (12 miles), work from home 2 times a week, and yet I go through the tank in a week. Even if I top it off 10 times a week, still I'm not using more gas.

@losiek:

Yeah. When I lived in California, we had the same problems with the electricity companies intentionally causing shortages in order to drive up prices. Though Enron was far and above the worst of the players, coming up with nifty "game plan" names, they had a lot of company in forcing prices up.

I live in Asheville, NC where we've been having a shortage for the past two or so weeks. For some reason the problem showed up here in the mountains a week or so before the rest of the South East, and from what I've seen here I can only imagine the hell people are going through in places like Charlotte and Atlanta. My brother was able to get me a few gallons in a can last week and I was able to get into my office and pack everything up and take it home with me so that I can work from here for a while.

For the people who don't believe the hoarding argument... trust me, it's real. First of all, it doesn't matter that over the course of a week or two they will have purchased the same amount of gas, because also over that week or two the stations would have received multiple shipments, giving enough time to keep inventories stable. Secondly, more people than you think are filling up gas cans. They tried to impose limits here. Unfortunately they only worked at certain places where they actually forced people to comply.

@jblack: Exactly. I am not exactly uncovering some secrets here by saying that even without the pipeline issues, the whole pricing thing stinks. When oil was $147 a barrel we had $4 avg in US. Now, it is down by 33% to $100 and yet the avg $ for gas is only 15% down? Eh, being consumer sucks ;-) And this is BTW primary reason I want someone to invent good fusion reactor. Good bye stinky oil!

@acasto: Sure, filling cans will do it. But just in the tank, the argument does not hold. So I "hoarded" 1-2 days more of gas on average. How's that making life worse in month long shortage?

I have to agree that the hoarding claims seem to be a meme invented by gas distributors to shift blame onto consumers. I refuse to believe there's a strain on supply lines if people are just topping off their tanks more. Now if people are showing up en masse with 5-gallon gas containers or if thousands are driving longer miles because some chain email said to stick it to the oil companies that way, that's a different story.

Sounds a lot like bankers trying to blame the bubble on consumers taking out mortgages they couldn't afford when in fact there's plenty of blame to go around at the top.

My brother brought up a good point:

You may not be using any more gas than normal whether you fill up once a week or 10 times a week, but waiting in line just to top off is more about hording the time and space from those who may need the gas more.

If the SE is short on gas, fine, I can deal with it. These lines, however... ridiculous.

I live near charlotte nc and work in charlotte. When I get down near half a tank i start looking around where i live and wait maybe 5-10 minutes and fill up. Hoarding or not I'll be damned if I'm getting caught without gas and then be forced to wait in line for hours.

The reason that "hoarding" aka "topping off unnecessarily" causes shortages is this:

Using low numbers for the sake of simplicity but the same logic applies:

Say a station has 7 customers who normally each come in on a different day of the week and buy 7 gallons of gas. The store gets 14 gallons delivered every two days.

Rumors of a shortage spread, so now on Monday in addition to customer 1 buying his usual, the Thu-Fri customers instead of waiting for their usual day come in and top off with 2 gallons each and use up all the gas.

On Tuesday the gas station is out, so the Tuesday customer can't fill up as normal.

On Wednesday, the Tue/Wed customers want to fill up, plus everyone who bought gas Monday wants to top off again. So once again there would not be enough gas for everyone who wants it... and so on - indefinitely unless they can get enough gas one day to fill everyone back up and quell the panic, which would get everyone back to their normal usage pattern...
...
If gas stations routinely kept 1000 times more gas than usual demand then yes, over time the demand is not going up any more than usual. However, panicking people want the gas they would normally want in a few days TODAY, so instead of being evenly spread out, the demand is being front-loaded and there is not the slack in the system to cater for it.

A Nashvillian here.

We were the first to be hit by this shortage (at least, first besides the local areas affected by the Hurricane) and we're still having intermittent gasoline shortages here.

But that's it.

It's very possible to find petrol now and you don't have to wait in line.

The moral of the story: Give everyone time to get their underwear pulled from the behinds and things will calm back down.

Why is it that the average price of gas around here is now 40 cents higher than the national average. Is that the consumers fault as well?

I live in the TriCities of TN theres plenty of gas here. It's 3.70 a gallon. In knoxville (about 100 miles away) Theres also plenty of gas and its 3.35-3.40 a gallon. Down another hour to chattanooga and its 3.80 with only a few stations with gas. 90 mins away in atlanta its 4.00 some places and theres traffic jams of people waiting in line for gas. Such a ridiculous situation that could be solved by spreading it out more.

@losiek: "Even if I top it off 10 times a week, still I'm not using more gas."

True, BUT you're going to the gas station 10 times more than you usually did, creating long lines and the artificial worry that there might not be gas when you need it. THAT'S the issue about "hoarding," which I think is a misnomer.

Actually, I see this as a wake-up call to individuals who do not realize just how unprepared they are to handle a crisis.

Folks, this is a relatively minor disruption in supply to a fairly small part of the country. I could imagine all sorts of scenarios that could cause much larger problems for huge chunks of the nation (no reason to name them - I'm sure you could easily come up with a dozen disaster scenarios yourself). Gasoline, water, electricity, you name it.

But we are so addicted to gasoline to go about our normal daily lives. And even if you personally have a hybrid car and a hundred gallons of gas saved for an emergency -- your neighbors, your co-workers, your customers, your suppliers, your shopkeepers, etc -- do not.

As a nation, we are never more than 48-72 hours away from running out of "something" - we rely on just-in-time resupply of vital resources, that *any* tiny little hiccup can cause massive problems. I see this particular shortage that the southeast is dealing with now as an example of what might happen on a larger scale in the future. Not if, but when.

An administrative assistant that drives an hour to work? How can you feel bad for someone using that much gas per day? This will help smarten people up. I bet that she drives an SUV to top it off.

@Bourque77: Supply and demand. You guys are demanding more than what they can supply. So yea, you are to blame.

Overall gas prices fell when the US consumer spent the spring and summer quarters driving billions of miles less.

Add to the fact that I think one of the gas pipelines heading to your part of the country was down for awhile. That gas was trucked in and it added to the price for awhile.

Give it awhile and you should be paying less than the north east in short time.

@masonreloaded: I like the way you explained that, my explanation for my mother had the same goal, but was way more complicated...

If only they could raise prices higher, thus sending a signal to consumers that the commodity is scarce and should be used sparingly! But that would be price gouging. I'm glad I'm not in the gas business right now, because it's damned if you do, damned if you don't. Allow me to explain the hoarding problem:

I did some estimation to figure that 8,000,000 gallons/day is probably Georgia's gasoline usage.
There are 9,500,000 people in Georgia, let's say half of them drive a car, that's 4,750,000.
Now, one day, everyone goes from running down to 1/4 tank on average, to 3/4 tank on average. That's 1/2 tank per person, let's say 9 gallons of gas.
New demand is 9 * 4,750,000 = 42,750,000 gallons, or about 5 days gas supply.

SO even if there were NO supply problems, if everyone did this, and the gas companies were able to increase normal supply by 25%/day, it would take nearly three weeks (20 days) for shortages to stop. If there are supply problems, and people are not reducing their consumption, shortages can quite literally continue indefinitely.

Did this problem exist before there were eleventy-seven different legally-mandated formulations for gasoline? I've been driving for 27 years, and living in the Gulf Coast/South almost all of that time and I don't remember weeks of gasoline shortages every time a hurricane made it to the Gulf Coast when Unleaded was the same most everywhere.

There's some empirical support for the concept of different gas recipes for different weather conditions, but it probably isn't really defensible that different states with similar elevations and climate require different formulations... it causes the inventories of any given formulation to be smaller, leading to more sensitivity to shortage.

I'd bet money that a rational mind (rather than 100 bureaucratic minds) could come up with two or three different forumas per season (to take local climate and altitude into account) that would give 99% of the benefit of the dozens of specialized formulas and make fuel more interchangeable again.

So all the way up here in Maine I can get gas for 3.45 a gallon, which I did today and there are no signs of any type of shortage at all but a state that is very close to the Gulf has issues.

I understand the storm hit, I understand a pipeline was shutdown but we do have these things called big rigs and trains that can move product from location to location.

Must suck huge monkey nuts to live down in GA right now and pay four plus a gallon after you waited two hours for it. I'd want to hurt someone as well.

They are out of gas because the Democratically controlled Congress will not allow Americans to drill in their own land which is plentiful with oil. We might kill some unidentified endangered fungus species if we do that.@starrion:

@losiek:

"Even if I top it off 10 times a week, still I'm not using more gas."

Actually you are, More fuel = more weight. more weight means fewer MPG. Keeping a full tank means you will burn more fuel, and the extra gas going to the gas station (even if on the way to someplace you were already going, its one extra startup for your car, which burns fuel)

@GothamGal: Atlanta is one of the most suburban-sprawled cities I've ever seen - I grew up down there, and towns that used to be way out in the boonies are suddenly considered to be suburbs. As an administrative assistant, she may not be able to afford much closer to Atlanta, and living in Dacula, I don't know if there are many jobs that much closer to home that don't involve a Hardee's uniform (I apologize if Dacula has turned into a thriving metropolis since the 1990s). You go where the work is - it's that way in most of the country, from what I can tell.

@xtc46: Statistically insignificant I say. Colder weather, inflated tires, 30 pounds more (on average) or less - there will be no noticeable difference.

It sure would be nice if there were more refineries to produce enough gasoline from plentiful oil. None have been built in the US in 25 years. Thanks democrats!

@losiek: You are obviously over-simplifying the situation. Here in the mountains things are quite spread out, so "1-2" days of gasoline in trucks and SUVs can amount to quite a bit. Then figure that suppliers are only able to secure maybe a third of what they used to be able to. Then figure that when gas was available at any given time that only a few out of a dozen stations in any given area actually had it. It's pretty simple... less gas going to stations, fewer stations have gas period, more people want gas.

Some of the blame for the shortages can be placed with the media. Everything on the news right now is doom and gloom. One of the big lead stories on fox in Charlotte was about a gas station that had gas and there were no lines. Come tomorrow they will probably be out.

I see this happen (Milk and bread) whenever there is a chance of snow or ice in Charlotte. Go out to the supermarket and the milk and bread isles are just about empty.

I do not think this would have been nearly as bad if the reporters (and the hoarders) used a little bit more common sense.

i'm in charlotte and i can understand how people filling up unnecessarily creates strain on the system and could contribute to prolonging a shortage. i do not and have not acted irresponsibly when obtaining gas. even if i were one of these jackasses causing fistfights in parking lots, hoarding would not have even been possible for me. there are no less than 20 gas stations of varying capacities within 5 miles of my house. not one has had gas for more than a few hours in the last two weeks. there was even a local news story about some people sleeping in their cars at a station down the street because they were completely out of gas and had no choice but to wait for that station to get a shipment. a couple of people were there for 24 hours before the delivery came. i spent a total of 4 hours in line this past sunday at three different stations, watching my needle tick down from an eighth of a tank just to get 8 gallons to get me to and from work this week. the first two ran dry while i was in line. i read the other day that the oil companies who supply our pipeline had a one week emergency reserve. that seems either incredibly irresponsible or incredibly arrogant to me. you have to supply roughly 20% of the nation and you don't think that your production capacity could be derailed for more than a week? fail.

@ashabanapal: I was actually lucky this Saturday (am in Charlotte too). The wife came home, she was on fumes, and told me that the BJ's up the street had gas. So, I grabbed my book, stopped and got a soda and a snack and went to BJ's. There was no line. Filled up, ran home got my car (had 1/4 tank) and filled it up. The line started forming up right about then and they were out of gas in no time.

All I can say is this is a great time to have got a brand new bicycle from costco.

I swear, somewhere in the last 10 years its like people have forgotten they have feet. You can honestly witness people sitting in their cars in parking lots -burning gas- so they can wait for someone to pull out of parking space A because it is 5 spaces closer than parking space B. I wouldnt think this country had gotten so stupid if i hadnt seen it with my own eyes.

People: Save gas. Walk the extra hundred yards. It cant be too bad for your health either.

@GothamGal: you must live in a small town....here in the Atlanta metro area, it is not unusual to have to drive an hour or more to work.

Atlanta has one of the worst commutes in the country and there are not many alternatives to driving a car to work. The subway and bus systems only cover a limited area of the city and even then, many of us have to drive several miles to get to a station. If you drive long distances to work every day on the interstate, topping off the tank at half a tank is a good idea.

I blame the media in large part for the run on gas here...at least in the beginning. But today things seem to be improving, so I hope we're turning the corner.

@adama4ld: How would that address the refineries being shut down?

I know already you won't answer.

@quail: But the 'demand' portion you speak of was precipitated by the announcements that there 'might be' a shortage of gas.
This happens all the time whenever these greedy ba$tards see some sliver of opportunity to make money off of the misfortune of others.

I now bow out so that others (and you know who you are) can tell me how wrong I am to blame the people on the top of this pile (with their hands in my pockets).

@Canino: Since nobody is stopping anyone from building refineries, your comment makes no sense.

Yeah, at any time T in the gas shortage, the time until normality is "a week to ten days" - this is the standard answer week after week after week. As time passes, the answer doesn't change, much like BitTorrent downloads that say 14 hours and when you turn on your monitor the next morning it still says 14 hours.

I guess no one is going to lay some blame on refiners who were cutting production all summer.

Do some searching and you will see that a lot of the gas swings were right around the 'gas supply went down 2% this week' and HEY since oil is high and refiners have no incentive to make gas they are cutting production.

Bottom line is that the refiners created the problem and the hurricane put a big explanation point on it.

@NotYou007:
It's not just the difference between living in ME and living in GA, either. I live in NC and we haven't had any shortages that I've seen (near Fayetteville). Seems crazy that one part of the state have problems and not another.

@mbouchard:
Yes, that happens here in SW MO too. If there is snow or ice forecast, everyone hits the grocery store pretty hard.

In the January 2007 ice storm, there was no gas because there was no power. Anywhere. I found an open gas station two days after the storm started and it took me 45 minutes to fill up. But people were polite and took turns. It was pretty cool.

I paid $3.09 for gas Monday. That's the lowest it's been in a while.

@GothamGal: You've got to understand that the job market here in Atlanta for admin assistants is dried up, so that hour commute may be all this lady can get. Also, an hour's pretty typical here... the centers of business and affordable residential areas are not always in the same place.