Driving the eight miles home from the office this evening, I passed nine gas stations — all of them totally out of gasoline. There is no apparent end in sight to the shortage which will have a lasting negative impact on the local if not national economy far more profound, I believe, than anything going on with the banks.
This is an outrage for which I blame, principally, the green extremists and their knucklehead allies in Congress who have stifled nuclear power as well as oil drilling and refinery in the U.S. for the past several decades. The primary culprits are Democrats. They should be thrown out of office, from sea to shining sea.
{ 35 comments… read them below or add one }
I am on fumes and drove to 7 gas stations last night. NO GAS.
Lines are impossible—I don’t even *have* enough gas in my car to go sit in line for hours waiting for a pump (if I could find one with gas).
This is RIDICULOUS….we’re 900 miles away from Houston/Galveston. My sister is north of Houston and she has gas at $3.50/gallon. PLENTY of it. NO LINES.
WHY is Atlanta the laughing stock of the country? We are being raped, screwed and pillaged by someone who is really enjoying seeing the police break up fights over gas pumps, people being towed off interstates because they ran out of gas, and the all out mayhem going on almost THREE WEEKS after Hurricane Ike.
Right down the road from my house is a gasoline tank farm. There is a RaceTrac gas station across the street. Guess what? That RaceTrac hasn’t had gas in 3 days.
WTH???????
Who stands to win from this:
1. Gas station operators
2. Gas companies
3. Tow truck operators
4. Investors in gas companies
5. …….fill in the blank.
I have to find gas sometime between now and Monday morning, or I will have no job. My boss will *not* accept the “I don’t have any gas” excuse.
Good God, we can send a man to the moon, but we can’t put gas in the pumps.
Three weeks of this nonsense, I am on my last nerve.
Jeny
Jeny –
No of those you’ve identified can possibly benefit from the lack of gasoline. In fact, some of them will go bankrupt because of it.
Those who caused this catastrophe (and thought they might benefit) are the environmentalists who have controlled America’s energy policy for 30 years. They are responsible for the oil shortage, the shortage of refineries and the lack of new nuclear plants to free up oil for manufacturing gasoline. That’s right: Oil is used “fire” electricity generating plant. If we had built nukes instead, we’d have the oil today.
So please don’t direct your ire and fire at the local gasoline-related businesses. This should be blamed on Democrats, primarily, who have no vision, no imagination and no leadership.
Well….I am back after traversing all the way to freaking DOUGLAS COUNTY to get gasoline. Stood in line forever on fumes. Had to turn the car off completely more than once so I didn’t run out while waiting.
Meantime, on the way to this lovely cas station, I had a jack-arse in a Silver Porsche Carrerra S take complete issue with me on Powder Springs Road Road—-he passed me on the left, pulled in front of me and slammed on his brakes for no apparent reason (called him in to the local 911). Don’t know who he was or why he did what he did—he blew up out of no where and if I pulled in front of him inadvertently, I certainly apologize. Me and my kids never ever saw him–all 6 eyes completely missed his expensive little toy.
At any rate, I am $87.00 lighter–(I drive a Chevy Astro), and that doesn’t count the $15.00 I spent at Sonic afterwards to feed my two teenagers (I didn’t eat, they did….).
I am now ready for a nap. What a horrible way to spend a Saturday.
Oh…and my neighbor across the street owns a tow truck. He told me himself Thursday morning (when I locked myself out of my car on the way to work), that he is making money hand over fist rescuing out of gas drivers.
I am SO tired of this…..
As for the environmentalists, don’t even get me started. I tried to pick up my son’s Asthma inhaler last night. Apparently they no longer have the old standard albuterol. There’s only something called albuterol HFA, which has a special expellant to push the medicine out that doesn’t use ozone damaging chemicals. Well…I’m asthmatic and I’ve used one of these HFA inhalers.
They freaking DON’T WORK. Not only that, beginning in December 2008, the old kind are ILLEGAL TO SELL OR POSESSES thanks to the lovely environmentalists who don’t give a shit about Asthmatics and old folks with COPD.
So, I’m taking a pool on this–how many Asthmatics and old people droping dead because of these shitty replacement inhalers will it take before they allow us to have the original inhalers?
My guess? At least 10,000. Once we have that nice round number, some dumbass at the CDC doing morbidity and mortality reseasrch on Asthmatics and inhalers will make the miraculous “discovery” that the HFA inhalers DON”T WORK–they KILL.
Even though Asthmatics have been saying so from the beginning.
Insult to injury: Co-Pay on the regular albuterol inhaler: $5.00. Co-Pay on the HFA inhaler: $45.00
So….I get to pay NINE TIMES what I used to pay for a POS inhaler that DOESN’T WORK and MIGHT KILL ME OR MY SON.
Thanks Enviro-whackos. I’m SO glad you care about children, old people and me.
Jeny
130 Gas stations get subpeonas!
http://www.ajc.com/metro/content/metro/stories/2008/09/26/georgia_gas_prices.html?cxntlid=homepage_tab_newstab
Bout damm time somebody started looking into the 3 week long “gas shortage” here in Atlanta. This is BULL$PIT.
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.
See http://www.ajc.com main page for the entire article.
Where to find gas in Atlanta:
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23atlgas&cxntlid=homepage_tab_newstab
Also, http://www.gasbuddy.com
By the way, RIP Paul Newman. I just read that he died.
http://www.accessatlanta.com/news/content/shared-gen/ap/Movies/Obit_Newman.html
A fine actor—and consummate gentleman, he will surely be missed by his widow, Joanne and all who loved him the world over.
God Bless and keep you, Mr. Newman.
Jeny
So, what’s going on in the SE? I haven’t heard about this on TV (I refuse to pay for cable or dishnet as long as it has to pay for channels I don’t want to support.), and I haven’t read about it online.
We don’t have a problem here in NM. I bought gas for $3.29 a gallon last night. Cheveron even had it for $3.33 a gallon. ( I did see a non-Cheveron tanker delivering gas there though. That was odd.)
As for the inhaler, last time I filled my husband’s prescription I was able to get it filled, no problem. It that a federal change or localized down there?
1. NO GAS in the gas stations in Atlanta. Must drive miles and miles to find one that has ANY gas–then it ususually regular unleaded only, plus diesel. IF you find one of those stations, they have lines a mile or two long. People sit in line waiting until they either get gas or they run out.
I had to go to a completely different county 25 miles away from our house to find gas this morning and sit online for an hour. When I got to the pump—they were out—but found one tank that still had some and I was one of the last few lucky ones to fill up.
2. The inhaler law is FEDERAL not state, and it takes effect in December. Drug warehouses are slowly starting to run out of the old inhalers in preparation of the new HFA inhalers. They don’t even manufacture the old kind any more.
Once the old inhalers are all gone–LOTS of COPD and Asthma patients will die as a result of these worthless inhalers. They *don’t* work.
Mark my words—this HFA thing is a BAD thing and it is the DIRECT result of enviro-whackos lobbying congress to do away with the old propellant inhalers because they contain CFCs and *might* harm the ozone.
Before they figure out the HFA inhalers are worthless, it will take 10,000 deaths, and then it is finally going to dawn on them WHY so many Asthmatics and COPD patients are dieing or in ICU on vents for status asthmaticus. Those that survive could end up brain dead vegetables. It’s all going to be a big party–thanks to the tree-hugging environmental whackos who could care less about the effects their policies have on HUMANS. REAL humans.
*sigh*
Jeny
Jeny –
The subpoenas on the gas stations is b.s. Won’t do anything to solve the shortage. My guess is you’ll get *maybe* ten stations in Atlanta who’ve actually be in a position to (as in, had gasoline to sell) AND tried to take advantage of the situation to gouge.
You’re wasting your blood pressure focusing on the stations. It’s the Congress and the environmentalist whackos who should be taken out and shot, figuratively speaking of course.
Cosmo —
It’s gotten so bad here in Atlanta, if you can believe it, that some officials were sincerely suggesting that the Georgia-Alabama game not be played this evening. When southerners start talking like that, you know they are hurting.
The deal is that nearly all of Atlanta’s gasoline comes from Louisiana and Texas through a single complex of lines run by Continental Pipeline. If that complex goes down or if its supply dries up, Atlanta gets no gasoline. And that is where we are, today.
Kurt—one of Continential’s Gasoline Tank Farms (where the pipeline terminates) is not far from our house.
Directly across the street from their Gasoline Tank Farm is a RaceTrac station where I buy about 99% of my gas.
Not a drop at that RaceTrac in 3 days. Nothing. Only the crappy diesel they recently installed that (eventually) is going to end up in some desperate (very stupid) consumer’s gas tank, and whereupon that consumer will sue RaceTrac.
When we bought our house, we were worried about that Gasoline Tank Farm being so close. Suppose a terrorist makes it go ka-boom—it sits 12 feet from the road with only a 12 foot chain link fence proteting it. If it goes ka-boom due to a terrorist, we will feel it, if not be directly impacted.
I’m not too worried about a terrorist hit there today. You could smoke a cigarette over there and throw the match down next to a tank and nothing would happen.
*sigh*
Kurt Schulzke { 09.27.08 at 7:13 pm } Cosmo —
It’s gotten so bad here in Atlanta, if you can believe it, that some officials were sincerely suggesting that the Georgia-Alabama game not be played this evening. When southerners start talking like that, you know they are hurting.
Absolutely—talk of canceling GA/Alabama, GA/Florida, GA/Ga Tech or GA/FSU is just plain blasphemy here. It ain’t done.
Even if there ain’t not gas and peeps gotta push their cars to the game, grill in tow.
Info about HFA inhalers:
http://www.consumeraffairs.com/health/hfa_inhalers.html
Apparently I am not the only one who lives in fear for their life now that the HFA inhalers are all Asthmatics can get.
Its ridiculous—the HFA inhaler is an inferior product at NINE TIMES the cost, that is being FORCED on Americans by their government–at the behest of the enviro-whackos.
I suggest it won’t be long before deaths and lawsuits are initiated.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2023839/posts
Freepers are doing a petition to save teh CFC inhalers from the stupid FDA/EPA, government gestapo trying to protect us Asthmatics to death.
http://www.pharmacychoice.com/News/article.cfm?Article_ID=96029
What a bunch of dumbasses…..this is the *whole world* banning HFC inhalers.
http://www.arap.org/adlittle/11.html
People are going to die. That’s for darned sure. They’re gonna die cuz these crappy inhalers DON”T WORK, and you can’t always get to the hospital in time to save your life.
This is RIDICULOUS—a life or death matter–and they’re playing games with our lives over junk science. The Ozone layer and Global Warming are just a buch of liberal hystrionics—that are making some folks some serious piles of money. Al Gore for one. Even though he invented the internet, he’s made a huge chunk of dough while being the largest (literally) hypocrite out there.
This is nuts.
Ok, just for the record. California is hearing nothing about the gas shortages in Georgia. Why? My bet is on the mainstream media not wanting environmentalists to look bad.
We know they are to blame for gas shortages. It is not the gas stations, who would happily sell–not shut down– if they had gas.
By every reasonable standard, we should drill here, drill now, drill everywhere. Including ANWR, for pete’s sake. AND build nuclear power stations.
Vote the SOBs out of office who are standing in the way. Enough of financing terrorists, and Russian and South American dictators with our gas dollars.
Wow! Who’d have thought gas availability and football games were inter-connected? I found this quote while Googling the gas shortage:
“He also thinks the shortage in Nashville may have been exacerbated by the Tennessee Titans-Houston Texans NFL game Sunday.”
http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2008/09/22/ap5455906.html
http://projects.ajc.com/gallery/view/metro/gasshortage0928/#homepage_tab_newstab#homepage_tab_newstab
Photos of the gas shortage in Atlanta.
Cosmo { 09.28.08 at 1:10 am } Wow! Who’d have thought gas availability and football games were inter-connected? I found this quote while Googling the gas shortage:
“He also thinks the shortage in Nashville may have been exacerbated by the Tennessee Titans-Houston Texans NFL game Sunday.”
http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2008/09/22/ap5455906.html
Oh yeah…..it’s connected.
Check out this article in the Altanta Journal Constipation
http://www.ajc.com/sports/content/sports/uga/stories/2008/09/27/georgia_alabama_gas.html?cxntlid=homepage_tab_newstab
Tommy Drew was running on fumes by the time he got to Athens from his hometown of Virginia Beach, Va., for Saturday night’s University of Georgia-Alabama game.
“I tried to gas up in Augusta, but there was no gas there,” said Drew, who has been on a fuel hunt since arriving in Athens on Friday. . .
That frustration and desperation was shared this weekend by motorists throughout North Georgia. Weeks after Hurricane Ike shut down Gulf Coast refineries and dried up interstate pipelines, the crunch continued, hitting hardest in Atlanta, Nashville and the Carolinas, including the Charlotte area and mountain towns to the west. . .
“I couldn’t find anything,” Miller said. “Then I got up this morning and a station near our house had gas. There was only about a 15-minute wait.”
He paid $4.29 a gallon.
The rest of the article is at the link above.
Cosmo { 09.28.08 at 1:10 am } Wow! Who’d have thought gas availability and football games were inter-connected? I found this quote while Googling the gas shortage:
“He also thinks the shortage in Nashville may have been exacerbated by the Tennessee Titans-Houston Texans NFL game Sunday.”
Oh yeah…..it’s connected.
Check out this article in the Altanta Journal Constipation
http://www.ajc.com/sports/content/sports/uga/stories/2008/09/27/georgia_alabama_gas.html?cxntlid=homepage_tab_newstab
Tommy Drew was running on fumes by the time he got to Athens from his hometown of Virginia Beach, Va., for Saturday night’s University of Georgia-Alabama game.
“I tried to gas up in Augusta, but there was no gas there,” said Drew, who has been on a fuel hunt since arriving in Athens on Friday.
“We heard at the hotel there was no gas in Athens. Then we heard Wal-Mart had some. The pump ran out when we were trying to fill up. I had to go across the street to Shell, where they only had Hi-Test.”
That frustration and desperation was shared this weekend by motorists throughout North Georgia. Weeks after Hurricane Ike shut down Gulf Coast refineries and dried up interstate pipelines, the crunch continued, hitting hardest in Atlanta, Nashville and the Carolinas, including the Charlotte area and mountain towns to the west.
But no mere gas shortage can slow down a Georgia Bulldog or a Crimson Tide fan. As “Dawg Fan” said on an AJC message board on the gas shortage: “I will be in Sanford Stadium on Saturday if I have to walk to Athens and back.”
In Athens, some stations were out of gas Saturday afternoon, while others had fuel available. At a filling station in east Athens, about five miles from Sanford Stadium, several cars and SUVs with Georgia flags were being filled up, with no wait. Up the street, another station had plastic bags covering all of its pump nozzles.
Freddie Collins, an Alabama fan, drove with a friend 4 1/2 hours to Athens from his home in Greenville, Tenn.
“Yeah I thought about it [not coming],” Collins admitted. “I’d heard about the gas problem, and we ran out back home last week. But the lure of the game is what did it for us. We wanted to come see a great ball game.”
Anticipating the drive to Athens, Harold Miller, 45, drove around for about an hour on Friday night looking for gas around his Dunwoody neighborhood.
“I couldn’t find anything,” Miller said. “Then I got up this morning and a station near our house had gas. There was only about a 15-minute wait.”
He paid $4.29 a gallon.
The rest of the article is at the link above.
Bosses are worried about workers showing up for work due to gas crisis….
http://www.ajc.com/metro/content/metro/stories/2008/09/28/atlanta_gas_commute.html?cxntlid=homepage_tab_newstab
You’re worried about finding gas? Consider the plight facing CEOs. Their commuting employees are facing higher gas prices, if they can get the stuff at all. If folks cannot get to work, the bottom line suffers. . .
GRTA has added routes, bolstering ridership, said communications director William Mecke. But the agency, he said, has noticed that more people than ever are riding.
The same is true for Cobb Community Transit, said Rebecca Gutowsky, the lines’ transit division director. She anticipates ridership to hit 4.9 million by the end of this fiscal year, which concludes Sept. 30. “It’s been a steady growth,” she said.
The rest of the article is at the link above.
Jeny–
Re: gas in Atlanta. Some friends told me today that they have no trouble at 5 a.m. (nurses on their way to work, bless them) and that there is no problem once you get out of Atlanta and suburbs. Go out I-20 toward Alabama or up in the mountains (aka hills) toward Dahlonega, etc. and the supply is fine with prices lower than in town.
Coco—that strategy is GREAT if you have the gas to spend to get out I-20 or go north on I-75 or I-575, but yesterday morning my van’s little trip computer was telling me I had 44 miles of gas left. I wasn’t going to risk going too far. Ultimately I did end up in a different county off I-20 to get gas, so that will be what I do again, should I find myself in that position again during this “crisis”. And I am going to check out the 5 am thing tomorrow, just for giggles, since I already have to be up at 6 what’s an hour earlier?
Thanks for the help.
Kurt, your knee-jerk condemnation of Democrats and Greens is horribly off-base. It doesn’t make sense, in the first place, in light of the comments above about gasoline being plentiful in other parts of the country, even in the track that Ike took through Texas and other states. I suggest that you look closer to home, at local meddling with the market.
Here is a link to an analysis that makes a lot more sense, and a short excerpt. The author places the blame on local — Atalanta — laws against “price gouging.” The author is a resident of the Atlanta area:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig6/bilger2.html
The culprit behind the gas shortages this time is individual state governments rather than federal government, but the solution is the same now as it was then – for politicians to stop their harmful efforts to control prices. End anti-gouging laws, end the shortage.
September 29, 2008
Aaron Bilger [send him mail] lives in the Atlanta area, where he does hardware and software engineering design consulting.
Copyright © 2008 LewRockwell.com
Doran-
The article leaves some gaping holes in logic. For example: Why wouldn’t all the stations be charging $4.29 a gallon, the legal limit, if it really would help them so much? You would expect them to be charging the full price if it would really help them get more gas tanked in from other states like the article says. In reality that has nothing to do with it. I talked with a manager at a station this morning. He said that the problem is that deliveries just aren’t getting here quick enough. If the EPA ban had been lifted a two or three weeks ago, then we might have been okay.
The problem is simply the EPA ban, but some blame also goes to Republican Governor Sonny Perdue.
http://www.wsbtv.com/automotive/17578885/detail.html
The jerks at the EPA caused the crisis, but Perdue exacerbated it by procrastinating.
It’s not just the jerks at EPA. And, true, it’s not just the Dems. But they have been the biggest contributors to America’s short-sighted approach to energy infrastructure development. Their refusal to allow the building of nukes, drilling for oil and building new refineries has dramatically magnified the impact of hurricanes. How stupid do you have to be to allow all of the refineries to be built on hurricane-infested coasts? To accept as the sole source of fuel for an entire region of the country a single pipeline? By the way, I used the name Continental. It’s actually Colonial Pipeline here in the Southeast:
http://www.colpipe.com/ab_map.asp
Blaming a gasoline shortage in Atlanta on Democrats and “greens, while apparently the entire rest of the continent has gasoline, is absurd. It is like blaming a localized blackout in Atlanta, following a hurricane, on the Dems and “greens” for not building enough generating capacity, or for locating generators directly in the path of a hurricane, just like those damned Dems and “green” located all those off-shore rigs, and off-shore off-loading facilities, and the refineries to refine all that off-shore crude, right in the path of a hurricane. Especially when “everybody” knows that it would be better to locate all the refineries in the mid-west, and pipe all those billions of barrels of crude from the coast to the midwest at huge cost…….Oh, but wait, what about all the tornadoes the mid-west has?????
On the other hand, if you are going to blame Dems and “greens” for the lack of gasoline in Atlanta, I guess we should also hold them responsible for the easy availability of gasoline everywhere else. Right?
Greens and enviros successfully lobbied for a “cleaner” blend of gasoline containing less sulphur than the rest of the nation’s gasoline, in order to “clean up our air” (not that it has at all).
You can’t just truck Alabama gasoline into Georgia and solve the problem. It doesn’t work like that.
Greenies have ensured there are lawas against that.
You can’t just truck Texas gasoline to GA….same thing.
THAT is why there is a shortage in GA where non exists elswhere, and THAT is why the greenies and whackos bear the blame.
Do your homework, Doran. You know better. Tsk Tsk.
Those same whackos have gotten rid of CFC asthma inhalers and don’t give a spit if Asthmatics and old people die because they can’t breathe and the POS HFA replacement inhalers don’t work.
As a lifelong asthmatic and mother of two asthmatics, forgive me if I don’t have a lot of love for Dems and greenies right now.
I do have a middle finger salute for you all. Obviously, given with all the due and proper respect deserving!
Doran-
If all of our refineries weren’t located in the gulf, and if we had nuclear power, we wouldn’t be in trouble right now. If the dems and greens weren’t blocking oil drilling, and nuclear power, then we wouldn’t be in trouble at all!
The bit about giving geens/dems credit for easy availability elsewhere is idiotic. Do we give credit to Hitler for the existence of Jews in New York?
jeny, pleaase either go take a walk, or get active and find the truth to help start to change policy; but like someone already said, quit wasting your blood pressure!