First came the rumors. Jimmy Morgan heard them from the cops who frequent his eight BP/Amoco gas stations in Carroll County. The police seemed to know before anyone that a gas shortage was coming.
In an email from the gas company Thursday, Morgan learned his allocation of gasoline would drop from 50,000 gallons a day to 11,000. That’s nearly an 80 percent decrease in supply, so he’s scrambling to keep the plastic bags off his gas nozzles.
“It’s a drastic cut in our allocation,” said Morgan, 52, whose family business, Morgan Oil Company, has been selling gasoline for 83 years. “By the time we finish delivering to our last store, the first store has run out.”
Jimmy Morgan's desperation is our desperation. Metro Atlantans know this feeling — a gas shortage. This is a place that practically runs on four wheels. So maybe you're getting up early to beat your neighbors to the gas pump. Or worrying whether you'll have enough gas to get through the week.
The gas shortage in Georgia has everyone from small-town distributors to big-rig truckers scrambling to find fuel. Drivers are caught in between, finding gas one day, not the next. Inside the shortage are tanker truck drivers on the hunt for fuel, traveling anywhere they hear there might be gas, to Macon or Savannah, making deals on the spot.
Morgan participated in a conference call on Thursday between oil company officials, pipeline reps and their distributors. Big shots talked about reopening a gas pipeline terminal in North Carolina and sending in extra barges of gas through the Savannah port. They also talked about pumping regular gas through another smaller pipeline that usually handles diesel. That has already started.
Such is the fallout from the rupture of the massive 40-inch Colonial pipeline in Alabama, pinching off gas to the region. Some drivers are facing outages in their local station. At the Smyrna QuikTrip, people found blank gas price signs and plastic bags around pumps. Prices are also starting to rise.
The average price of regular in metro Atlanta on Monday was $2.50 a gallon by day’s end, up from $2.16 a week earlier, according to GasBuddy. The price spread was dramatic, with some stations charging more than $3 a gallon, while a few still stubbornly clung to sub-$2 prices, according to the website.
Colonial is building a bypass around the segment of the 54-year-old broken line, with completion expected this week, said company spokesman Steve Baker. But Jimmy Morgan is thinking things won't be back to normal for three weeks.
A lesson in gas
A little lesson on Atlanta’s gas supply: A river of gasoline, jet fuel and other fuels flows through metro Atlanta, thanks to two pipeline operators based here, including the nation’s largest, Colonial Pipeline Co.
Colonial and Alpharetta-based Plantation Pipe Line run four pipelines up to 40 inches in diameter and thousands of miles long. Combined, they typically pump almost 140 million gallons of fuel a day through the region, most of it headed farther up the coast to Washington and New York from dozens of refineries along the Gulf Coast.
Plantation operates a 3,100-mile network that runs from Louisiana to Washington, D.C. The system, which dates from 1942, handles 29 million gallons of gasoline, jet fuel and other fuels daily.
QuikTrip spokesman Mike Thornbrugh said the company is operating at about 50 percent of capacity at its roughly 200 stores in the Southeast.
“More supply is working its way into metro Atlanta,” Thornbrugh said. But a big bottleneck, he said, is that truckers are having to wait five and six hours in line at pipeline terminals to pick up loads of gasoline.
At a gas transfer station
Over at the giant tank farm in Doraville, some drivers of the big trucks sounded a little desperate. There’s already a gas line there.
"I just came down from Chattanooga. They don't have any gas," said Hieu Hoang, at the end of a line of a half-dozen tanker trucks waiting for gas. Trucks had come from Gainseville, Hampton, Montgomery.
He’s been given a simple order: “Whatever we can find, load it up and take it back,” he said.
“Oh man, it’s been crazy,” added trucker Cazavius Murphy.
This was Murphy's second trip here Monday, but some days he's been making a half-dozen. Later, he knows that when he pulls the truck into a gas station, "people come swarming like ants."
Gasoline deliveries are still being made to convenience stores, but in many cases they are limited. That’s created a seemingly random patchwork of open and closed stations.
At the Citgo station on Buford Highway in Doraville, Valerye Ortega squeezed the pump handle again and again to get every drop she could into her car. She wanted to be sure she had gas. In the car was her 1-month-old daughter, and she has doctors' checkups and places to go, she said.
She’s used to paying $35 to fill up, but this time? $53. This isn’t her regular station, but she needs premium gas and several stations by her Grayson home were clear out. Premium-gas drivers may be facing more shortages as stations load up on regular.
Bob Shah, who’s been running this Citgo station for 20 years, said he had gasoline for a few more hours. Then he’ll be out for days.
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