Pumps run dry at more than 1,000 gas stations [Video]

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW:

• More than 1,000 gas stations have used up their fuels amid a surge of panic buying following the cyberattack on Colonial Pipeline.
• The federal government blamed the Russian hackers as infiltrators of the ransomware attack.
• Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm encouraged people not to panic.

In the aftermath of a ransomware cyberattack against US pipeline operator Colonial Pipeline, over 1,000 gas stations had been run out of supply across the country’s southeast region, following a panic buy surge.

Among the badly hit states include North Carolina, where close to nine percent of that state’s 4,500 gas stations were already used up. In Virginia, about eight percent of over 3,900 gas stations had dried up, per the data obtained by Gas Buddy, which has over five million active US users.

In a Twitter post by Gas Buddy analyst Patrick De Haan, motorists have consumed over 20 percent of gas stations in the metro Atlanta area in Georgia.

“This doesn’t mean 80% DO have gas, it means 80% haven’t been reported to us,” he wrote on late afternoon Tuesday.

According to the Associated Press, over 1,000 gas stations across the US have been exhausted per S&P’s Oil Price Information Service.

“A lot of that is because they’re selling three or four times as much gasoline that they normally sell in a given day, because people do panic,” S&P analyst Tom Kloza told the AP, adding that “it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

Colonial Pipeline, the pipeline company situated in Alpharetta, Georgia, was met with a cyberattack last Friday. Tuesday was the fifth consecutive day of the pipeline’s shutdown, affecting the 5,500 miles network (spanning from Texas up to New Jersey). It provides over 45 percent of gas, diesel, and jet fuel supplies to the nation’s East Coast.

The federal government has pointed to the Russian hackers called the “DarkSide” as the enablers of the cyberattack.

In a White House briefing, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said that Colonial was already working to restart its operations and would go manually online next week.

Granholm added the pipeline operator was considering to restart most of its operations before the week ends, appealing to the public to refrain from panicking even with the scarcity of fuel.

“Let me emphasize that much as there was no cause for, say, hoarding toilet paper at the beginning of the pandemic, there should be no cause for hoarding gasoline,” she said.

Source: New York Post