A cyberattack on one of the East Coast’s main pipelines has made gasoline the new toilet paper: It’s the one thing everyone needs but can’t find.
This week, a hacker group known as DarkSide attacked the Colonial Pipeline, which is about 5,500 miles long and transports nearly 45% of the East Coast’s fuel supply, forcing the pipeline to shut down. Gas prices began to surge almost immediately in Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia, hovering near $3 per gallon for the first time since late 2014. The longer the outage continues, the more gas prices will rise, said Tom Kloza, the global head of energy analysis for the Oil Price Information Service.
Demand for gasoline has skyrocketed too. More than 1,800 gas stations across the Southeast ran dry as people scrambled to fuel up, leading to long lines at gas stations and angry encounters between customers. A reporter in Raleigh, North Carolina, documented one incident during which a woman “tried to cut the line, hit a car & spit on a man while yelling.” And one Kentucky resident said people were lined out into the streets at her local gas station, waiting to fill up four or five jugs of gas. Some people even waited hours overnight to fuel up.
“With no cars, no nothing, they were standing in lines with gas jugs,” Dannikka Ramirez told a local news outlet.
Like the toilet paper shortage during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, the problem isn’t a lack of supply, but the urge to hoard all of the supply that’s available. East Coast residents are panic-buying way more fuel than they need, which is creating serious problems for those who need it. Uber driver Isaac Campbell in North Carolina told a local news outlet that he spent an entire day looking for gas with no luck. By the end of the day, he had only one gallon left in the tank.
“I don’t know if I’m going to be able to get back home,” he said.
The governors of Florida, Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia have all declared states of emergency, and the White House urged people on Tuesday to fill up only when necessary. But even once the panic abates, the effect this shutdown will have on gas prices could last long into the summer, experts say.
So much for that summer road trip.
