The pumps at the nearby Mobil station went dry last Friday at 6 p.m. and didn’t come back online until 8 p.m. the following night due to panic buying on Friday morning.
Jim Smith, President and CEO of the Florida Petroleum Marketers and Convenience Store Association, said panic buying resulted in an “unprecedented demand” for fuel from Sept. 11-13. Now fuel trucks can’t get gas from distribution points to gas stations fast enough.
“Everybody saw excessive demand from Pensacola to Key West,” he said, but he couldn’t offer specific data since his organization doesn’t track that.
“Stabilization is going to happen through the trucking companies, but you can’t run those guys 24 hours a day,” Smith added.
According to a spokeswoman for the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, which monitors statewide fuel inventories when extreme weather threatens, the fuel supply was adequate throughout the recent spate of storms.
At Port Everglades, which provides fuel to a 12-county area and is the only South Florida seaport with petroleum storage facilities, fuel shipments are at capacity, said port spokeswoman Ellen Kennedy. The port can handle four fuel tankers at once and that’s the number that was docked on Wednesday. Shipments should remain high in the coming days, too, she said.
Sixteen percent of the gas delivered to Port Everglades comes from Texas, Kennedy said. However, “what typically happens if there’s trouble in the Gulf or Texas is the oil companies make it up with foreign oil,” she added.
David Mica, executive director of the Florida Petroleum Council, said inventories have been adequate throughout Florida, although it’s been challenging to overcome the shortfall due to Gulf refineries going offline.
About 30% of domestic oil production and 27% of refining capacity comes from the Gulf region. Some of Florida’s disrupted supply can be made up from foreign sources such as Caribbean refineries, he said. However, Mica declined to comment on how this dynamic may impact fuel prices.
By late Wednesday afternoon, the state attorney general’s office had fielded approximately 5,500 calls related to gas issues and had forwarded just under 2,400 to its Economic Crimes Division to be scrutinized for possible price gouging. The number of calls coming in has remained steady since Friday morning, said Sandi Copes, spokeswoman for the attorney general.
Palm Beach topped the number of complaints in South Florida with 93. Broward had 63 and Miami-Dade had 58 as of Wednesday evening.
As part of an emergency order issued in advance of Hurricane Ike, the Florida Department of Transportation relaxed regulations for petroleum trucks, a move hoped to ease delivery problems.
Author: Jo Amey
