NEW YORK — A growing number of gas stations were flashing empty signs on Tuesday as panic-buying gripped Florida, where residents are bracing for a monster hurricane to make landfall.
Hurricane Milton was downgraded to a Category 4 storm on Tuesday as it grinded past Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula en route to Florida’s Gulf Coast where over 1 million people were ordered to evacuate. Parts of Florida are still recovering from Hurricane Helene, which battered the state at the end of September.
The storm is expected to make landfall on Wednesday.
By 6:30 p.m. ET on Tuesday, 7,912 gasoline stations in Florida, about 17.4% of the total, had run out of fuel versus almost no outages on Monday morning, according to data from fuel markets tracker GasBuddy.
As people rush to get out of harm’s way, demand for gasoline has jumped, said Patrick De Haan, an analyst at GasBuddy.com.
“These numbers will continue to rise very fast,” De Haan said. Milton’s path over Tampa Bay is spelling trouble for major fuel distribution networks, he added.
Florida is the third-largest gasoline consumer in the United States, but there are no refineries in the state, making it dependent on waterborne imports. More than 17 million tons of petroleum- and natural gas-related products move through Tampa Bay in a typical year, according to the Energy Information Administration.
Tampa and most other Florida ports were closed on Tuesday to all vessel traffic, reports by the U.S. Coast Guard showed.
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TERMINALS SHUT
Kinder Morgan has shut its Central Florida Pipeline system, which moves refined products between Tampa and Orlando, the company said in an emailed statement. It has closed all fuel delivery terminals in Tampa, but expects trucks to be able to pick up fuel from Orlando wholesale racks until winds exceed 35 miles per hour.
Fuel trucks cannot safely deliver at wind speeds exceeding that threshold, wholesale distributor Mansfield explained, and said it expects wind conditions to bring all Florida fuel deliveries to a near-halt by Wednesday.
Refiner CITGO Petroleum and infrastructure and logistics provider Buckeye Partners are also shutting down their Tampa terminals, the companies told Reuters.