Hurricane Florence won’t cause the jumps in fuel prices experienced last year after Hurricane Harvey ravaged the nation’s oil patch on the Gulf Coast.
At least, that’s how Dan Eberhart sees it. Eberhart is CEO of the oil services firm Canary and an ardent Republican donor and supporter of the president.
“I lived through Hurricane Katrina, actually, so this stuff is kind of near and dear to my heart,” Eberhart told the Washington Examiner in between visits with Trump Cabinet members. “But I think it’s going to have less of an impact to the oil and gas industry than Harvey did, simply because the refinery complex is right there on the Gulf Coast.”
Hurricane Florence is primarily affecting North and South Carolina, along with the border stretch of Virginia. The area is not a major hub for oil production and refining, although major pipelines that feed gasoline as far north as Washington and New York go through the Southeast.
Eberhart said the storm’s impact on the region is going to be “a tragic situation for a lot of folks, but I think the refinery complex won’t be negatively impacted. So, I don’t expect prices to rise overnight.”
Eberhart says the administration is sensitive to criticisms of Washington’s response to hurricanes going back to former President George W. Bush’s record on Katrina.
“As far as the Trump administration, obviously, Bush was panned for how he handled Katrina, and Trump has received some criticism for how he handled what happened in Puerto Rico last year,” Eberhart said.
Eberhart suggested the administration needs to be careful when it comes to being sensitive to the needs of people harmed by the hurricane’s effects.
“So, I think the Trump administration has to be very careful to make sure they are very focused on helping folks and mitigating the negative impact and externalities of this hurricane, as much as they can,” Eberhart explained.
Trump has been taking on criticism of his response to hurricanes Maria and Irma that smashed Puerto Rico’s infrastructure and electric grid.
Earlier this week, the president provoked criticism by tweeting that “3000 people did not die in the two hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico.”
“When I left the Island, AFTER the storm had hit, they had anywhere from 6 to 18 deaths,” the president tweeted on Thursday. “As time went by it did not go up by much. Then, a long time later, they started to report really large numbers, like 3000.”
The official number of fatalities in Puerto Rico from the hurricanes had been 64, according to a Commerce Department study.
He accused the Democrats of manufacturing the higher number “in order to make me look as bad as possible when I was successfully raising Billions of Dollars to help rebuild Puerto Rico,” the president tweeted.
“If a person died for any reason, like old age, just add them onto the list. Bad politics. I love Puerto Rico!” the president tweeted.
The death toll number came from a study that Puerto Rico’s government commissioned from the George Washington University’s Milken Institute School of Public Health to assess the number of fatalities.
Previous studies have calculated even higher numbers of fatalities.
