A growing number of gas stations displayed empty signs Tuesday as panic gripped Florida, where residents braced for the landfall of a monster hurricane.
Hurricane Milton headed toward Florida’s battered Gulf Coast on Tuesday as a massive Category 5 storm, causing massive traffic jams and fuel shortages as authorities ordered more than a million people to flee before it slammed into the Tampa Bay area.
The storm is expected to make landfall on Wednesday.
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As of 2230 GMT on Tuesday, 7,912 gas stations in Florida, around 17.4% of the total, had run out of fuel, compared to almost no outages on Monday morning, according to data from fuel market tracker GasBuddy.
As people rush to get out of harm’s way, demand for gasoline has skyrocketed, said Patrick De Haan, an analyst at GasBuddy.com.
“These numbers will continue to increase very rapidly,” De Haan said. Milton’s path over Tampa Bay is causing problems for major fuel distribution networks, he added.
Florida is the third largest consumer of gasoline in the United States, but there are no refineries in the state, so it depends on maritime imports. More than 17 million tons of oil and natural gas-related products flow through Tampa Bay in a typical year, according to the Energy Information Administration.
Tampa and most Florida ports closed to maritime traffic on Tuesday, according to the US Coast Guard.
With information from Reuters