The Department of Transportation is waiving federal trucking rules to ease the flow of gasoline and other fuels into the Hurricane Florence impact zone that extends from South Carolina to Maryland.
“The fuel situation is one of the first situations that goes short during an emergency,” Alex Keenan, emergency coordinator for the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, told the Washington Examiner on Tuesday.
The waiver for truck drivers is a “major” role for the Department of Transportation to help the relief effort, which will require supplies to be trucked and bused in without placing federal limitations on drivers.
The waiver would relax the 11-hour federal limit on the amount of time a fully-licensed and insured truck driver can stay behind the wheel.
As an example of how the waiver could help, Keenan explained that it could allow truck drivers to bring more fuel from out of state to parts of Virginia. Simply put, “the tankers have to drive a greater distance to get the fuel,” Keenan said.
If the federal restrictions remained in place, in many cases the gasoline tankers would have to park and wait several hours, leaving fuel supplies waylaid and out of the regions where they are needed, he said.
The same waiver for fuel tankers will also apply to utility trucks, he said.
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President Trump told reporters that the utilities in the region have great capacity to deal with the storm’s impact. Trump said the hurricane would be one of the largest seen “in decades,” adding that the storm would be “tremendously big and tremendously wet — tremendous amount of water.”
Federal Emergency Management Administration chief Brock Long said his goal is to help make the jobs of electric utilities easier with whatever assistance they need to coordinate the relief response.
Long emphasized that it is not the job of the federal government to tell the power companies what to do.
Electric utility repair trucks are already moving by the hundreds into the hurricane impact area across state lines from Ohio and Kentucky. Duke Energy, one of the largest utility firms in the country based in North Carolina, called in the utility crews from its affiliates in those states.
The states that have issued emergency declarations have relaxed state driver restrictions along with the federal waiver, according to the National Association of Convenience Stores, a top trade group that represents the retail fueling industry.
“Specifically, the states both waived hours of service requirements for drivers transporting fuels and other essential supplies,” the trade group said Tuesday. “The states also waived certain size and weight restrictions to help ensure the continued transportation of supplies.”
Other agencies, such as the Environmental Protection Agency, should be expected to relax environmental requirements to allow more gasoline and diesel fuel to flow into the areas impacted by the storm.
