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Stockpiling Fuel for Generators May Have Contributed to Florida Gas Shortage

Posted on: Thursday, 14 July 2005, 00:00 CDT

Jul. 14--PENSACOLA -- The day after Hurricane Dennis blew through town, Eric Gleaton drove 120 miles round-trip to Bay Minette, Ala., to fill up on gas -- not just for his Ford F-150 pickup, but also for the nine fuel cans that power his generator.

"You can run a lot off of it," Gleaton, 50, a Pensacola real estate developer whose power was out for six days after Hurricane Ivan last year, said of the generator. "I slept last night with AC."

Just days after the storm, and with an estimated 109,000 customers in the Panhandle still without electricity, gasoline was so sought-after that an open station with ample fuel merited a mention on local radio and television broadcasts.

Many were after the gas to power generators they purchased after Ivan, when thousands of people in Pensacola and Escambia County went without electricity for as long as three weeks.

But by stockpiling fuel for those generators -- many purchased last year with money from the Federal Emergency Management Agency -- they may have contributed to critical fuel shortages both before and after the storm.

"Gasoline is an issue, and it's going to be one of the big issues," Gov. Jeb Bush said when he visited Pensacola earlier this week. "One of the challenges we'll have is the lack of gasoline."

State officials were so desperate to get fuel into the area that they asked the federal Environmental Protection Agency to relax rules on the sulfur content of diesel sold in Florida until Monday.

State emergency managers also worked with private fuel distributors to direct 100 trucks with 1.8 million gallons of gasoline into the Panhandle 24 hours after the storm, and another 2.9 million gallons were set to arrive on tankers in the ports of Pensacola and Panama City, said Deena Wells, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Environmental Protection.

"The residents of Pensacola and those counties in the Panhandle remember quite well the challenging conditions" after Ivan, Wells said, adding that the number of people who gassed up and evacuated before the storm added to the fuel crisis.

Before and after the storm, state officials had logged more than 1,500 complaints about price gouging at gas stations. The state attorney general's office subpoenaed the financial records of two petroleum companies to determine why prices the companies charged gas stations increased as much as 30 cents per gallon as Hurricane Dennis approached.

Agriculture Secretary Charles Bronson also subpoenaed the records of 11 North Florida gas stations to determine whether they were gouging customers or were merely passing on the cost of their fuel.

On the day after the hurricane, as many as four out of five customers at one Pensacola gas station were buying fuel for gas cans, not cars, said station owner Buddy Williams -- an indication that much of the demand was for generators.

Williams actually shut his pumps down early before the storm so he would have some gas to sell right after Dennis if his station's power was restored -- and it was.

"We're spoiled," said Tom Trull, 60, a retired safety inspector from Pace who waited in line for three hours at a Raceway station down the street. "We learned after Ivan that the most important piece of equipment is a generator and a window AC unit."

Trull used his generator to power the refrigerator, a deep freeze and the all-important window air-conditioning unit in the bedroom. It was so cold in the bedroom Monday night that his lab, Charlie, jumped up on the bed between Trull and his wife, Pat, to get warm, Trull said.

Tuesday, he and Gleaton zeroed in like vultures on a perfect post-storm confluence of events: a Gulf Power lineman working across the street to restore power and a gasoline tanker truck delivering fuel.

"We knew we would get gas if we were just patient," said Gleaton, himself a former lineman who watched the Gulf Power worker with a practiced eye. Some 50 cars were in line behind him.

Records from FEMA indicate that the agency reimbursed Florida residents for 222,255 generators last year. The agency spent more than $185 million on generators.

After the storms, eligible people who could prove they were without electricity -- regardless of income level -- were reimbursed up to $836 for the cost of their generator, and many also received vouchers for fuel.

Many people paid for generators out of their own pockets. During a two-week sales tax holiday on hurricane supplies in June, Lowe's home improvement stores in Florida sold 28,000 generators, a spokeswoman said. Home Depot wouldn't disclose its sales, but they were brisk, said spokesman Don Harrison.

"We sold every generator we could find," Harrison said.

In Pensacola neighborhoods this week, generators hummed nonstop -- at night, they blocked out the loud chirps of the frogs that emerged after the storm. During the day, the generators gave off a foggy exhaust that cast a haze over entire neighborhoods.

There's nothing efficient about the gas-guzzling generators; Trull said his model will run about 12 hours on five gallons of gas, adding up to about $25 a day.

But he and others say it's worth every penny. Psychologically, they believe there's something comforting about returning a little bit of normalcy to life, especially when everything else is a mess.

The home that David Richbourg and Norman Ricks share in Pensacola's tony East Hill neighborhood was one of the only ones around with a generator after Ivan, so their home became a gathering place for friends and neighbors.

People who didn't have water after the storm would jump in their pool to cool off, then feast on whatever was defrosting, Ricks said. Some nights, they fed as many as 20 people.

Between Ivan and Dennis, Richbourg, the former owner of a gourmet cooking shop, had replaced the aging generator with a new, much higher-tech model -- at a cost of several thousand dollars. But it went on the blink Monday night.

"That's a hell of a lot of money to pay for 24 hours of power," Ricks said.

Indeed, said Richbourg.

"I want this thing fixed," he said. "Because it's going to come again."

Herald staff writer Jack Dolan contributed to this report.

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Source: The Miami Herald

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