With Hurricane Milton currently wreaking havoc across the Tampa Bay area of Florida, as well as other parts of the state’s western coast, experts are warning that getting gas on the peninsula will be a challenge.
The warning comes from Patrick De Haan, the head of petroleum analysis for GasBuddy. Currently, the gasoline analysis site has a live tracker that is being updated with the “percentages of stations without fuel in each of the major cities in the state.”
“Almost a quarter of gas stations in Florida don’t have gasoline,” De Haan shared with NewsNation’s “CUOMO.” “In Tampa … 63 percent of stations don’t have gasoline right now.”
De Haan shared that when the storm passes, it could be days or weeks before every gas station in western Florida is able to be replenished.
“It’s not like these outages are going to just magically going to solve themselves. There are still a lot of complications from this storm,” he said.
Among the complications include the main gasoline gateway for most of Florida’s Gulf Coast and whether or not the damage to roadways and ports allows gas to return to cities that are out.
“A lot of it’s going to be contingent on the Port of Tampa and Port Manatee. Potentially, there could be damage,” De Haan said. “The Coast Guard’s going to have to do assessments to see if those ports can accept shipments of barges from Texas and Louisiana refineries.”
For the rest of the country, De Haan said that gas prices are now beginning to stabilize after four years of rising and falling costs at the pump, sparked by the pandemic and the move away from Russian oil following the start of its war with Ukraine.
“The U.S. is still producing a record level of crude oil,” he added. “The U.S. is still the world’s largest energy producer, and that’s part of the reason why gas prices have gotten closer to what many Americans consider normal.”