Three Out of Four Gas Stations Are Dry in Some Southern Cities | Hacker News Reader

Three Out of Four Gas Stations Are Dry in Some Southern Cities

bloomberg.com

26 pointscwwc28 comments

Are gas stations selling out because of lack of supply or increase in demand (ie stocking up/panic buying/however you want to call the inclination to fill-up when you fear pumps might run dry)

> Are gas stations selling out because of lack of supply or increase in demand (ie stocking up/panic buying/however you want to call the inclination to fill-up when you fear pumps might run dry)

Yes. There is a real supply issue, but people are aware of the supply issue causing panic buying. Prospective shortages cause a positive feedback loop.

What sucks about panic buying is that it makes perfect sense to "panic buy" even if you don't think there will be an actual shortage, but only panic buying.

Not being able to get what you want/need looks the same either way.

So far it looks like panic buying. I've seen several gas stations around here receive deliveries from tanker trucks. Yes, sooner or later local stockpiles will get depleted (thank you all the brilliant just in time manufacturing idiots from the 80's and 90's) but as long as the pipeline isn't out for a significant period of time things shouldn't get that bad.

Everyone should still be staying at home sheltering in place to flatten the curve so not sure why all the consternation :p

I saw a gif of a lady filling up plastic bags, and I was shocked that it was allowed.

I'm pretty sure other countries have rules about what containers you can/can't fill up from a petrol station. Is this not a thing in America?

I feel like "You can only put petrol in your car, or in a single jerry can" as a rule, even temporarily, would solve the panic buying problem, and also make the whole place safer.

There are rules about what you can fill up. The gif you saw was probably fake.

https://imgur.com/gallery/YWCCHnf

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/hoarding-gas-plastic-bags/

I guess people’s stupidity is hard to underestimate, but there are still rules about what you can put gas in (“approved containers” aka gas cans). Doesn’t mean the minimum wage worker at the gas station is inclined to enforce the law, though.

You're definitely not allowed to do that, there are huge signs at every gas station saying it's against the law.

People are getting weird though: my gf told e I should buy some gas cans and store them on my apartment balcony/car trunk. It was surprisingly difficult to explain how dangerous storing gas is and why the requirements for it are so crazy.

I'm a little bit older, but when I was coming up in the tech field the rule for critical infrastructure was never connect it to an external network unless it was necessary. Its amazing to me that the systems that control the pipeline itself aren't on a segregated network.

My understanding is (although it may not apply to this particular pipeline) that they shut some of the pipes off depending on the degree of arbitrage between the two ends. I met someone who wrote code to do this once (although I think it was a petroleum pipe to a refinery.)

That's certainly a reasonable explanation for why they do it. But as part of our critical infrastructure, should we allow them to trade security for potential profit? I'm sure there are all sorts of added risks they could take to increase profits, but that doesn't mean that we, as a nation, should allow it.

Everyone is going to forget this hump in gas supply and the anxiety it causes among ICE vehicle owners as soon as the next EV article comes up. How much more proof do you need that the gas supply is easily disrupted (no matter how much you want to attribute this to the snowballing effects of panic buying, the root cause is still a single disruption/point of failure) and not just some logistics that you can take for granted as if they always work without a hitch?

I really do think it's going to take a lot of people by surprise when we hit that coming cross-over point where "gas range anxiety" is (again) way higher than "EV range anxiety".

I don't know where you live, but I'm used to power outages a lot more than gasoline outages. As evidence that is not just a delusion, I notice that you can buy gas powered electric generators in the stores.

Do you see electric powered gasoline generators anywhere? It would certainly be possible in theory.

I don't know where you live, but I've seen less than 10 outages in 35 years of my life and they never lasted more than 1 or 2 hours.

I can't remember a longer outage than that offhand, but in ~40 years, I'm sure there have been some.

Causes of power outages I can think of that might happen in my area:

  - wind storm
  - ice storm
  - tornado
  - squirrel got in a transformer
  - car hit a pole

I'm sure there have been more unusual things in several decades, but those are what come to mind.

One thing to keep in mind is if you are in a position where only your home lost power, or only your apartment building, you may be a low priority and have to wait longer for the power company than if there are a bunch of customers without power.

Your electricity runs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, you are in a position to notice power outages much more easily than gasoline "outages". Gasoline supply is hidden behind a logistics dance of shifting prices and for the most part "outages" (really "shortages") usually get swept under the rug of economics and you won't notice them. (Until you do, such as the panic runs we've been seeing in the US South after a single pipeline hiccup.)

It's a fun false equivalency, but thanks for trying.

>It's a fun false equivalency

My comment was about how they are different, not equivalent.

You sound angry, but also I don't see any disagreement buried in your negative words.

I don't know how personal attacks help your argument. There's no anger in my comment. Eyerolling, perhaps. If you don't understand how I am disagreeing with you then we are probably done with this conversation.

>I don't know how personal attacks help your argument

Saying you sound angry isn't a personal attack, nor is it saying you are angry.

It's just saying you sound angry and hostile, which led me to genuinely do my best to understand what you were disagreeing about. I couldn't find it.

"Sweeping under the rug" appeared to me to be a metaphor with negative connotations, but not a denial of gas being less of an issue. You seemed to be saying "yeah, it's less of an issue, but that's bad".

> Saying you sound angry isn't a personal attack, nor is it saying you are angry.

Saying I brought emotion to the argument is Tone Policing, which is a form of an ad hominem (personal attack), in that it implies that I shouldn't bring emotion to the discussion, or maybe should have used differently emotional wording "to better support my argument". Rather than arguing the content of my argument it argues the surface of my argument, if not also the substance of my character. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_policing

"Sweeping under the rug" may have a negative connotation sometimes, but the bigger implication/connotation is one of "hidden information". Gas companies want consumers to think that gas gets to pumps like magic and have a lot of vested interests in people not generally questioning gas supply logistics. So they have a lot of ways to "hide" that "dirt" under the rug (of their economics model). As a consumer we have no idea how many gas shortages there are in a given period in any given region because gas companies aren't going to tell us and generally work very hard to make sure that we don't know. Sure from some consumer perspectives it is "less of an issue" because ignorance is bliss, but from the other perspective it is far "more of an issue" in that it is harder to prepare for it. Panics like this snowball precisely because people have no idea a shortage is happening until it feels "too late" and they feel as consumers they have lost control. Electricity outages while inconvenient rarely cause panic in and of themselves, and areas prone to more outages generally have more preparedness for them.

At the end of the day it is entirely apples and oranges to compare electricity outages and gas shortages, though. One is a simple, ubiquitous, extremely fungible utility with a wide variety of suppliers and used for a wide variety of applications/appliances/needs and the other an extremely complex, less fungible (a car that needs gas generally can't substitute for diesel and vice versa) supply chain with fewer overall suppliers and for the most part only a single (intended) use. Electricity is used immediately at the time of demand (so outages have a real time effect) and gas has a time shift of several weeks or more between purchase and usage (further blurring the time sensitivity to shortages and adding more reason how short term shortages can easily be hidden).

I would have far more difficulty securing an electric connection that reaches my car than finding gas. I've been in a great many places that don't even have electricity, but I could always find petrol. Not just in central Europe but in North Africa and central Asia and everywhere in between.

Gas supply was tight once elsewhere because of a mild panic. For short instant, refueling was on my mind. With electricity, it's part of every trip you plan.

Of course, this vastly depends on how you use your vehicle. If I traveled shorter distance and had a plug at home, electricity would feel much safer.

When people hoard shortages happen. Yeah - how insightful. Next they will dramatically intone that water is wet.

This will only be an issue if the pipeline stays down for an extended period of time. And with everyone still mostly working from home/social distancing this is probably the best time for something like this to happen.

Hopefully it will be a wake up call to all companies that backups and disaster recovery plans only work if they are routinely tested and maintained. Any company forced to pay for ransomware (and good luck if they actually deliver anything past payment - ha!) needs to have its executive management held to account. Anyone can get ransomwhere these days - it should be nothing more than a temporary inconvenience if a company has an integrated approach to it's operations - and that's across all business areas, not just IT. Disaster recovery is NOT solely an IT problem.

How much excess gasoline storage capacity do you think people have? I would bet that the vast majority of people nothing more than their car's tank, and a small minority additionally have a handheld one or two gallon red canister. "Hoarding" is not enough to explain this.

Apparently as many buckets, totes, or even plastic bags as they can fit in the trunk :(

Here in Florida, there's always a run on gas as tropical storms approach. Just everyone making sure they have a full tank at the same time is a big strain on the supply but there are a lot of people with generators and 5-10 five gallon cans.

If we assume that the average gas tank is half full, and then a large number of people decide to top off their tanks, that could be a huge amount of fuel, right?

That just moves up demand for the next week into the next two days. It's a spike but not that much.

In 2016 SC had 1.8million vehicles, maybe 75% of them pump an extra half tank (~~8 gallons?)

Call it 10m gallons extra, and I think the pipeline transports 100m gallons a day.

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