BLOGGER TEMPLATES AND TWITTER BACKGROUNDS »

Thursday, September 25, 2008

Gas

For those of you not in the Southeast, you may be interested to know that we are going through a bit of a crisis at the moment. In a sad commentary on the state of our national infrastructure, various cities throughout the Southeast have been running almost completely out of gas for the last few weeks, in the wake of Hurricane Ike. Last weekend, it was reported that 85% of gas stations in Nashville and its surrounding suburbs were out of fuel. This week, it appears to have spread to Charlotte.

The gas station across the street from our home has been mostly out of fuel for the last week or so. This morning, they received a new delivery. Within 20 minutes, there was a line for about a half mile down the road of people waiting to fuel up. After an hour, the line stretched to a mile. Police had to be called in because some people were filling up multiple containers of gas, and other drivers were screaming at them, apparently causing altercations. The gas station employees, who I just talked to, were scared for their safety because some drivers were threatening them about the people filling up extra containers.

Yes, panic has completely set in. Every station I have seen in the last few days is out of gas, and nobody knows what to do. School is likely to be canceled next week because buses cannot find diesel fuel. This is ugly, folks.

I thought this might be an interesting tidbit for those of you elsewhere, that still have plenty of gas. How is it that our infrastructure is so poor that we, more than two weeks after the hurricane, are completely unable to get a more even distribution of fuel throughout the country? This also serves as a telling illustration of this country's absolute reliance on fuel for our everyday lives. Not that we didn't know that already, of course.

2 comments:

nathan halley said...

Our infrastructure is, in general, horribly horribly shitty in this country.

Or maybe it is you. Remember that bridge collapse? You used to live there. Now this...

Matt Welle said...

Oh shit, the Arch is coming down!