Fuel Availability Tracker Activated

by Andrea Hinds, Williamson County Source

To help consumers find gas after last week’s cyberattack on Colonial Pipeline caused gas price spikes and outages, GasBuddy has activated its Fuel Availability Tracker.

Colonial Pipeline, which delivers 45% of the supply of gasoline to the Southeast, suffered a ransomware attack last Friday, causing the pipeline to go offline. This primarily affects southeastern states, like Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, Mississippi and parts of Florida.

GasBuddy and other leaders of the industry stress that consumers should not panic, as panic buying will prolong outages and price spikes, making the situation worse.

However, if you fuel up often, you have already noticed long lines at gas stations and outages around Williamson County and beyond.

GasBuddy’s Fuel Availability Tracker is now live within the free GasBuddy app, consumers can quickly differentiate stations that have or do not have gasoline or diesel fuel available. The information is crowdsourced so motorists are encouraged to report the status of any station they see to help others find gasoline or avoid stations with no fuel. When a motorist is near a station that has no gas, diesel or power, the GasBuddy app will automatically display NO GAS or NO DIESEL or NO POWER icons next to the station on the list screen, and the station will be highlighted in red on the map screen.

For more information on the fuel availability tracker, see here.

In a statement, Colonial Pipeline says they are preparing for a system re-start and certain government actions are helping to alleviate some of the disruptions.

“In preparation for our system restart, we have taken delivery of an additional 2 million barrels (~84 million gallons) from refineries for deployment upon restart.

Consistent with our safety policies and regulatory requirements, Colonial has increased aerial patrols of our pipeline right of way and deployed more than 50 personnel to walk and drive ~ 5,000 miles of pipeline each day.

Actions taken by the Federal Government to issue a temporary hours of service exemption for motor carriers and drivers transporting refined products across Colonial’s footprint and actions taken by several Governors to lift weight restrictions on tanker trucks should help alleviate local supply disruptions.”

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