Gas stations in town started the week at $239.9 a gallon for regular unleaded — down 10 cents from the week before. By Wednesday, the prices had jumped to $285.9 in reaction to the flooding from Hurricane Katrina and damage to oil refineries and pipelines along the Gulf Coast.
Thursday morning brought another shock: $305.9. By afternoon, the signs showed $319.9 and the town’s two independent retailers said they would most likely run out of gas during the long Labor Day weekend because supplies are running short and the big oil company stations get the first allotments.
This news comes just when I have to drive to Rural Retreat tonight to shoot a high school football game. I filled up the Wrangler Wednesday night and it will take a half-tank or so for the drive.
In some parts of the South, gas is already over $5 a gallon and still climbing. My yard needs mowing this weekend and that exercise alone will take $15 in gas.
While we can afford to pay such inflated prices, many people on fixed or reduced incomes cannot. Many who live in our area drive 60-100 miles roundtrip a day for work. How long can they survive with prices so high?
Some say this day was coming and we should have done more to prepare for it. That kind of hindsight will not ease the burden on people who may not be able to afford to drive to work, to the grocery store or who may be unable to buy the propane or fuel oil they need to heat their homes this winter.
September 2nd, 2005 at 12:45 pm
Doug, do you think that seeing how thin the veneer of civilisation is in America will have an effect on the long term attitude to its place in a sustainable World for all mankind . . . or will the deaths and privation just be brushed under a gloss of propaganda of ‘we will overcome it’?
In Europe we pay those prices for gas as the norm, but on the whole we get far better benefit for it that watching the Oil Co. stockholder add electrification to the fence around his property.
Don’t forget that the Oil Co sets the price for the oil it buys from its own production arm and moves that on to its retail arm to add their profit . . . Chinese walls my arse! (and most of it is not taxed).
September 2nd, 2005 at 8:38 pm
Doug,
your yard is TOO BIG if it takes $15.00 to mow it…alot of our environmental problems come from the huge manicured lawns that Americans desire…plant native species that don’t need mowing on an acre or two instead…
sandie
September 7th, 2005 at 10:33 am
“Some say this day was coming and we should have done more to prepare for it.”
Knowing that the low price of gasoline that this country has enjoyed for generations would eventually cause problems is not hindsight.
Sort of like knowing that a city built below sea level will someday be flooded.
September 7th, 2005 at 10:55 am
It’s funny, out here on the west coast, the prices went from 2.70 up to around 2.95 at Arco, and just hovered there. I am amazed at how high prices have gone in the south and midwest, but out here in CA, they havent spiked at all that much. I guess it is because we have a different supply chain and our refineries make a different blend with stricter smog controls. Before the hurricane, prices were around 2.65-2.75 for 87 octane and we were about the highest in the country. No one would of ever expected anywhere else to have prices climb as high as they have in the South, but it took a hurricane to find out they could!