The cheapest (regular unleaded) gas I saw on the way home was $1.80, and the highest was $3.00. I did see lines and people filling not only their cars, but also spare gas cans.

http://www.wftv.com/news/4921136/detail.html

Plenty of gloomy stories.  Search Google News for "out of gas"

I haven't filled up any of my 3 cars for days and I don't intend to. I think they all have less than half a tank now.

We're trying to reduce driving as much as possible, and using the better mileage vehicles when possible. Today I needed to go to the local university library, five miles away, so I rode my bike instead of driving.

I biked past the gas station closest to my house to see how things were doing, and it was $3.04 for unleaded regular. Felt pretty good going past on the bike.

The 6,000 power line workers currently assembled in southeastern Louisiana won't be nearly enough to restore electricity to the 990,000 customers still without power in metropolitan New Orleans, the region's suppliers said Wednesday.

But getting more workers to the area might be impossible until late this week. That's because many utility crews from neighboring states are still restoring power to southern Florida, which was hit surprisingly hard by Katrina when she crossed the state nearly a week ago, said Chanel Lagarde, spokesman for Entergy Corp., Louisiana's power supplier.

"There are severe limits on resources at this point," he said. "We are told that the utilities in Florida are expected to wrap up later this week. Many of those (workers) will come directly here or to the east" in coastal Mississippi and Alabama.

The atmosphere of near-anarchy in New Orleans is another major concern, said Arthur Wiese Jr., vice president of corporate communications for Entergy.

"We can't send workers out and put their lives in jeopardy," he said late Wednesday afternoon from the one of the company's storm command centers in Jackson, Miss. "Once we have facilities back operating, we have to know that our workers can get to work safely.

"We are as alarmed as anyone over the chaos in the city. It is a very serious question," Wiese said.

Those problems further validated earlier predictions by Entergy managers that many people in the hardest-hit parts of the state could be without electricity for a month or more.

Flooding and road blockage from debris remained the most immediate barriers to repair crews moving into the most damaged parts of the region.

The mass evacuation from the Metro New Orleans area has put extreme pressure on all housing options and fuel availability. Crews that we have sent in to some of the stricken areas are sleeping in their trucks. Public facilities such as parking lots, schools, etc. are also being used by relief agencies and or other public entities to handle the public evacuation.

Fuel trucks that we would normally depend on are being directed by federal and state agencies to support their public emergency needs first, leaving us short of fuel in some areas to support our restoration crews.

No doubt most things will get fixed eventually, but it's going to be vastly slower than if only one infrastructure was down.

8/29/2005:  $2.999/gal (unchanged for ~2 weeks)
8/30/2005:  $3.059/gal
8/31/2005:  $3.129/gal

For those from Merced :) , that's +$0.13 in two days.

Cheers!

I am riding my bike tomorrow anyway.

One station went from 2.859 Wednesday morning to 3.129 Wedneday evening. Another went from 2.899 Wednesday morning to 3.259 Wednesday evening.

$4.00/gal can't be far off ...

Many of Entergy's biggest industrial customers take power directly from the large transmission lines that run from Baton Rouge, La., to New Orleans. Those lines had been built to withstand 150 m.p.h. winds and were among the first restored to full service on Tuesday, according to George Bartlett, Entergy's director of transmission operations. He said that he expected most refiners and manufacturers in the corridor to be able to resume business and that some had already done so.

Mr. Bartlett said that refineries owned by Exxon Mobil and Murphy Oil were the only major ones situated south of New Orleans, an area where marshy conditions had forced the company to build less storm-resistant transmission lines. Entergy has made helicopter surveys of those lines and hopes soon to complete projections about when they can be restored.

The Mississippi Power unit of the Southern Company appears to have been the hardest-hit utility. Katrina damaged 70 percent of its 8,000 miles of transmission and distribution lines and blacked out all 195,000 of its customers in southeastern Mississippi, the company said. A generating station just east of Gulfport, Miss., was knocked out by flooding.

"It may take as long as four weeks to restore service in the worst-hit areas," said Michael L. Tyndall, a Southern Company spokesman. As of yesterday, only about 5,000 Mississippi Power customers in Meridian, an inland city, were back online.

Convoys of utility trucks and reinforcement workers from as far away as Massachusetts and Ohio are arriving in the gulf states to help restore electricity to the estimated 1.6 million household and business customers still without power in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

Some, like the thousands transferred by the Southern Company, are on loan from other branches of big utility conglomerates with a presence in the storm-damaged region. Others, like the 10 two-man truck units dispatched from New York City by Consolidated Edison have been sent with the industry's tacit understanding that no company is an island on the weather-vulnerable power grid.

As ports remained closed from Louisiana to Florida on Wednesday, some 300 barges containing grains and other products were left homeless.

Under the management of Cargill, a large agriculture producer and exporter, the barges were caught in a bottleneck caused by the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. Now they are floating on rivers north of New Orleans with nowhere to go.

Two days after one of the worst storms ever ravaged the Gulf Coast, large parts of the nation's distribution system were feeling the effects. Major transportation arteries were clogged, and imports and exports had slowed to a crawl. The logistical logjam could delay the production of hundreds of everyday products. The result is that consumers, even those far from the storm's epicenter, might have to pay more for everything from coffee and bananas to paint and tires.

Grains are the largest export likely to be affected by the devastation to the ports, because they are so dependent on the river barge system. In July, about half of the country's grain exports were shipped from the Mississippi River gulf outlet, said David D. Lehman, managing director for commodities at the Chicago Board of Trade. "Those facilities are all without power and could be impacted by the flooding," he said.

"If this is a 5- to 10-day problem, it won't significantly impact the grain markets," Mr. Lehman said. If it is longer, then importers will start switching to buying from other ports, mostly likely along the West Coast.

But with gasoline and diesel prices being sharply affected by the loss of refining capacity caused by the storm, shifting to other ports will create costly logistical complications that will probably be passed to consumers in the form of higher prices, shipping firms said.

David Feider, a spokesman for Cargill, said it was "not feasible" to divert grain shipments to trucks or trains because of the high cost and the loading infrastructure required.

Coast Guard officials said that they were finishing underwater surveys of shipping channels. So far they have found an unusual amount of soil and sand build-up, and a number of buoys and other navigational aides either missing, destroyed or misplaced, creating the potential for ships to run aground, said Petty Officer John Miller, a Coast Guard spokesman. Some ships struggled with the question of whether to divert to other ports.

Oil and gas companies are stepping up efforts to reach hundreds of employees who remain unaccounted for days after Hurricane Katrina slammed the Gulf of Mexico.

Companies want their workers to call hotlines posted on company Web sites or, at the very least, get word to supervisors through someone that they're safe. Companies also want to let workers know about housing and other assistance available to them, should they need it.

"There is an urgency to hear from them, but we have to be patient because the devastation is so severe that their first priority is taking care of their family and personnel needs," said John Hofmeister, president of Houston-based Shell Oil Co.

Shell's workforce in the Gulf is about 4,500 people, some of whom work on refineries shut down in Convent, La., and Norco, La.

Hofmeister said it's especially difficult to learn what's going on because of restricted access to the hardest hit areas.

San Antonio-based Valero Energy Corp. also plans to provide assistance, "financial or otherwise," the company said in a statement.

Valero is preparing to offer temporary housing help by setting up trailers near its St. Charles refinery when it opens within the next two weeks.

I'm glad I bought my hybrid Prius in 2001. I get 46 MPG in L.A. traffic. My wife owns a VW bug diesel and gets about 40 mpg, and with this latest price spike, diesel is now a bit less than premium - a week or two ago,it was way more.

Despite having my kids in the car for the 30 minute wait for gas, I was calm, as was everyone else. As Halfin and others noted, this will be told as a story of refinery capacity (probably so environmental regs can be gutted). What will be interesting (from the point of view of a non-trader who tends to think aobut long term issues) will be whether or not prices return to the pre-Katrina levels, or simply trend at this new level.

I am looking for information on the pipeline status to the Atlanta area.  Anybody have a source?  

I'm not letting my tank get less than half empty anymore.

cheers,
Torion

I live in Britain, land of £0.93 a litre petrol!

Another sta in BV was also sold out today. Haven't seen any others out.

Wynnsol