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Thousand of gas stations turned off their signs once they ran out of fuel on Tuesday as parts of the country deal with the aftermath of the cyberattack on the Colonial Pipeline orchestrated by the ransomware gang “Darkside.”
The Colonial Pipeline is a private company that controls the largest pipeline in the United States. The pipeline runs from the Texas Gulf Coast to the New York metropolitan area. The states most dependent on the pipeline include Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, and the Carolinas.
The S&P’s Oil Price Information Service has a number of gas stations suffering from fuel shortages at more than 1,000 at the time of writing. Some analysts said that panic buying could be playing a role in gas stations running out of fuel.
On social media, multiple videos went viral of people showing that their gas stations were out of fuel in states including Tennessee, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Alabama, Arkansas, Virginia, and others.
Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm warned that gas stations in the impacted regions of the country will likely continue to experience a “supply crunch” even after the pipelines are fully operational again.
“The crunch is in the areas that are affected by the pipeline, the main spurs of the pipeline,” Granholm later added. “So that really is the Southeast. It’s about 70% of the supplies of North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, and especially Southern Virginia are impacted the most. And so those are the areas that we have the greatest concerns with. And because of the fact that there’s not a whole lot of other supply… Now, this particular pipeline also supplies other states, but there are other pipelines that supply their states as well.”
“We know that we have gasoline, we just have to get it to the right places,” she claimed. “That’s why these next couple of days, I think, will be challenging. And we want to encourage people, it’s not that we have a gasoline shortage, it’s that we have this supply crunch and that things will be back to normal soon and that we’re asking people not to hoard and know that we are all over this.”
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R), Georgia Governor Brian Kemp (R), and Virginia Governor Ralph Northam (D) all declared emergencies on Tuesday due to the crisis. North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper (D) declared an emergency over the matter on Monday.
