Doris Turner had five more meals to deliver when she heard the dreaded ding-ding-ding: the chiming signal from her 1997 Buick Park Avenue that she was perilously low on gas. She knew she had maybe 20 miles’ worth left in the tank, not enough to deliver meals to the five remaining senior citizens who were counting on her.

She started looking for a station with gas on Cascade Road near I-285, “but every station I went to had those bags on the pumps.” She started calling friends on her cellphone; one said there was gas at Northside Drive and I-75.

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Jason Getz/jgetz@ajc.com

Senior Citizen Services of Metropolitan Atlanta staff driver Doris Turner removes a meal from her pack before she delivers it to a resident on the north west route.

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Jason Getz

Senior Citizen Services of Metropolitan Atlanta staff driver Doris Turner packs her automobile with the day’s meals before she begins her route. She removes a meal from her pack, and delivers to Ernestine Carter, 73, at her home Thursday morning. Last Saturday, Turner literally ran out of gas and had to call for another driver for her route.

GAS SHORTAGE

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She headed north. But she never made it.

“It was a crazy bad feeling,” she recalled about sitting on the side of the road last Saturday afternoon, out of gas. A friend filled a gas can and brought it to the stranded Turner, who then returned to Senior Citizen Services of Metropolitan Atlanta, where she works, to find someone with more gas to finish the deliveries.

With the gasoline supply still short in metro Atlanta — sometimes a little, sometimes a lot — SCS has been forced to reduce the frequency of some deliveries to its 300 clients for a week or two. Other local nonprofits that run Meals on Wheels programs haven’t had to do that yet, but they know their drivers — many of them volunteers hunting down and paying for their own gas — are struggling.

“We’ve definitely seen a dropoff in our volunteers,” said Robin Kirby, chief marketing officer for Senior Connections, which delivers about 1,000 meals a day to seniors in DeKalb County. “We’ve had to consolidate some routes and have paid staff do them instead of volunteers.”

The area gas shortage comes on top of a long run of high gas prices and the stressful stream of bad economic news coming from Wall Street.

“We’re very concerned about the general trend here,” said Jeffrey Smythe, executive director of SCS. “The more bad news we get on the economy [that feeds the] perception that things are falling apart, the less people want to donate.”

Volunteers hit hard

Because so many agencies deliver meals in so many parts of metro Atlanta, no one tracks how many thousands of elderly, blind or handicapped people depend on volunteers to bring them food. But the gas shortage has put them at risk.

“This is a huge deal for Open Hand,” said executive director Stephen Woods of metro Atlanta’s largest such service, formerly Project Open Hand, which delivers about 4,500 meals a day. So far, the charity has not had to cut back on any services.

When the gas crisis first hit, Open Hand made unofficial deals with some stations to let it fuel its trucks, Woods said. But that doesn’t necessarily help volunteers like Barbara Antley, who delivers meals in her own car every Thursday to clients in the Old Fourth Ward and Cabbagetown.

“It’s one of my favorite days of the week,” Antley said. “It just fills a real need in me to feel like I’m giving something back to the community. Delivering is a priority for me — it wouldn’t be one of the things I would cut out if I had to cut something out.”

Sometimes, though, volunteers have had no choice but to bail on their commitments.

“The people on our route rely on us to be able to bring their meals to them,” said Marietta’s James Alford, who delivers meals with his wife, Kezia, for SCS. “All of them are elderly, one guy is blind, another lady can barely walk. These people are just not able to go out and do stuff.”

So Alford was particularly upset recently when he went to “six or seven different gas stations” trying to fill up before his route. He ended up with needle even more buried on “E” than when he had started, and had to call the nonprofit and apologize that he just couldn’t make it in. Another driver was able to cover his route.

Kindness of strangers

“The people we serve in our business are typically homebound and so they get very insecure and very uncomfortable, and nervous and frightened when they … hear news reports about the gas shortage,” Woods said of Open Hand.

“One of the most important things for them is the reassurance that our delivery person, a live, real person, that comes to their home every day is going to be there,” he said. “That gives them a great sense of comfort.”

As always, nonprofits depend on the kindness of strangers in the current shortage. A donor gave $1,000 to SCS specifically to help volunteer drivers buy gas.

“It’s going to help those who have stuck with us,” said Smythe.

“You divide that up between your 10, 20 most loyal volunteers, you don’t have that much to give each of them,” he said. “It’s better than nothing.”

Doris Turner, meanwhile, went out on another run Thursday morning, delivering meals to seniors. This time she did started her route with more than half a tank of gas, and did not run out.