Gas shortage-How are you doing down in the southeast US?

We are not affected by this here in Columbus, OH so it’s like watching y’all in the southeast through a fishbowl.  Bring it home for me, peeps.  Tell me your stories.  How is this gas shortage affecting you?

from peakoil.com…

HOUSTON — Some gasoline stations in parts of the Southeast are out of fuel and shortages could persist for days as refiners continue to recover from the one-two punch of hurricanes Ike and Gustav.

The storm, which struck the Texas coast 10 days ago, caused less damage to the region’s energy infrastructure than feared. In most cases, the biggest issue for refiners has been getting electricity restored and their equipment restarted — a process that can take several days because of the size and complexity of the plants.

“We’re capable of running full operations, but we don’t have the supply to maintain that kind of flow rate,” said Steve Baker, a spokesman for Colonial Pipeline, which delivers gasoline and other fuel from Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama to major cities in the Southeast and along the East Coast.

Baker said Monday the pipeline, which was not damaged in the storms, was beginning to get barrels from affected refineries, but he couldn’t say when Colonial would be back at full capacity.

That all depends on how soon the refineries themselves return to normal operations.

excerpt from usatoday.com…

The pipelines that supply the region are operating at less than normal capacity, due largely to storm-related power outages at Texas refineries, said Kenneth Medlock, energy fellow at the Baker Institute, a non-partisan public policy think tank at Rice University in Houston.

The Southeast, the only region of the nation that has no oil refining or major gasoline storage capacity, pumps all of its gasoline in by pipeline, he said.

“In isolation, neither of these storms would have been that big a deal, because there’s enough inventory (at stations) to make up the shortfall,” said Medlock. “But there was a three- to four-week period of refinery capacity not operating. That’s basically a month when nothing’s being produced.”

Panic buying — drivers topping off every time they happen across a station that actually has gas — made the problem worse, said Marylee Booth, executive director of the Tennessee Oil Marketers Association.

“If people saw a tanker drive up to a station, they’d start lining up. The panic has died down. It’s getting a little better every day.”

I am hearing and reading that Nashville has the worst of this situation.