OAK BROOK, Ill. It has been more than five weeks since Hurricane Katrina came ashore along the Gulf Coast and wreaked havoc on the homes and businesses in the tri-state area of Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi. And by almost all accounts, the effects of Katrinaas well as Hurricane Ritawere nothing short of disastrous for the retail petroleum industry.
But there is a silver lining behind the storms, and most of it stems from the energy bill signed by President Bush less than a month before Katrina ravaged the Oil Belt. The new energy bill has helped [image-nocss] mitigate the shortages [of gasoline] because it allowed blending fuels, Bill Douglass, CEO of Douglass Distributing Inc., Sherman, Texas, and board chairman of the National Association of Convenience Stores (NACS), told CSP Daily News.
That's been a tremendous help, he said. It allowed us to substitute conventional [fuel] for reformulated gasoline, and allowed us to pull different REID vapor pressures across state lines.
Those boutique-fuel waivers were among the changes NACS lobbied to get into the bill signed into law on August 8. What happened is, the bill is so new, when Katrina hit, it took a few days for the government to even realize that they had the power to [allow those waiver], Douglass said. But when Rita came, it was in place. They had already worked that through. So that was very exciting for us, a real positive development.
It's that delay in action, however, that Dan Gilligan, president of the Petroleum Marketers Association of America (PMAA), would like to prevent in the event of a similar tragedy in the future. All our requests to the EPA for waivers and extensions were all done on the fly, Gilligan told CSP Daily News. We were reacting. I was averaging 120 emails per day [immediately following Katrina] from our state associations and members identifying problems.
Once the gasoline supply problems caused by the hurricanes smooth outand both Gilligan and Douglass said that time has not yet comethe leadership at PMAA plans to examine just what happened that first week of September 2005. We definitely are going to spend significant time going over what happened, how it happened and how we can better position both the jobber community and the retailer community for these events in the future, Gilligan said.
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