Ga. officials investigating 130 gas stations

The state has received 1,300 complaints of gas gouging and has subpoenaed sales records from 130 gas stations to determine if they illegally jacked up prices in the wake of Hurricane Ike.

Complaints have been coming in steadily to the governor’s Office of Consumer Affairs since Sept. 15, the Monday after Gov. Sonny Perdue signed the executive order enacting Georgia’s gas-gouging statute to protect consumers from stations illegally raising up prices.

Bill Cloud of the Office of Consumer Affairs said it will take several weeks to prove stations were illegally gouging consumers on prices.

He said his office had one report Tuesday that an Acworth station was charging $8.82 a gallon, but that report hasn’t been verified.

The agency learned a lot from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when there was a run on gas because of fears of fuel shortages. Cloud’s office received 6,000 price-gouging complaints, including reports of jacked up hotel rates and gas prices.

In the end, Consumer Affairs wound up getting settlements from gas gougers in 83 cases. The next highest state for gas gouging settlements was New York, which had 14. However, the cases took a long time to make. The latest settlement occurred 13 months after Katrina.

Ike shut down many Gulf Coast refineries because of power outages, leaving Georgia gas stations with little gasoline to refill tapped pumps.

The Associated Press contributed to this report