North Carolina police advise residents to ‘limit nonessential travel’ as fuel shortage grips the East Coast

Police in a North Carolina city advised residents Wednesday to “limit non-essential travel” and stop hoarding gasoline as the state grapples with a fuel shortage following a cyberattack on the Colonial Pipeline.

The city of Charlotte, which has seen 71% of its gas stations out of fuel, relies heavily on the Colonial Pipeline, said Capt. Brad Koch of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department. He advised residents to leave their homes sparingly and check on their elderly neighbors as frustrations mount in the area.

“Limit nonessential travel,” Koch said. “If you do not have to come out and go out, please do not. … Check on your neighbors — your elderly neighbors that might not be able to get out. Just see if they need something. See if when you’re going out to the store, if you can pick something up.”

“Do not hoard fuel,” he continued. “We are going to get through this, similar to whenever we have severe weather and we seem to lose a lot of bread and milk at the stores, similarly to last year at the beginning of the pandemic.”

NORTH CAROLINA DRIVERS FIGHT AT THE PUMP AS GAS SHORTAGE PERSISTS, VIDEO SHOWS

Sixty-five percent of gas stations in North Carolina were without fuel, making it the hardest-hit state, according to the latest data from GasBuddy. Earlier in the day, 72% of pumps in the Raleigh-Durham area had run dry.

Tensions in the state came to a boil when two North Carolina drivers, a man and a woman, were seen on video fighting over a spot in line. The witness, who filmed the encounter on Tuesday in Knightdale, said a woman in a white car tried to cut through the line of vehicles waiting to receive fuel at a Marathon gas station.

When she wasn’t let through, the witness reportedly said the woman drove into the side of an SUV waiting in line.

The female got out of her vehicle and spit on the SUV driver, the video appeared to show. The man is seen getting out of his vehicle and walking over to spit on her, causing a physical quarrel.

A dozen states have been hit with a shortage in some capacity after hackers with the criminal organization DarkSide breached the Colonial Pipeline’s internal computer networks in the most significant and successful cyberattack on energy infrastructure in the United States. Around 43% of stations in South Carolina are without fuel, 43% of Georgia’s gas stations have run dry, and Virginia has seen 44% of its pumps experience the same.

Major outages have also been noted in Alabama, Florida, Kentucky, Maryland, Mississippi, Tennessee, West Virginia, and Washington, D.C.

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The Environmental Protection Agency issued emergency fuel waivers in 12 states and D.C., allowing them to bypass fuel requirements until the end of May as they grapple with the fallout from the pipeline shutdown.

Governors in North Carolina, Virginia, and Florida issued similar orders statewide, declaring states of emergency as the fuel outages continue.

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