Lets hope they are OK. Sounds miserable. Hope the wall
> street infestation packs up and goes home.
We had four MILLION people without power when Hurricane Yikes hit three years ago, some as long as two weeks.
The ghastly thing was that gas stations were ALSO without power, so there was no way to get generator food.
So here's the tip: When you get advance notice of a weather emergency, fill up all your gas cans (I have ten, 6-gallon containers and a half-dozen smaller ones).
You can always dump the gas in the car if you don't need it for the generator.
Same reason they don't here. They cost money and the station operators don't see a payback in most cases. CT is considering a couple of new laws that will required at least some stations to have generators.
I imagine it could be a $3000 to $6000 investment to do it and while the oil companies are making money, the local station owner is on a thin margin.
In many (most?) cases the local station doesn't own the gas franchise. He makes his money on slurpees and the couple of cents the oil company pays him.
That's just another data point showing the absurdity of "anti-price-gouging" laws. Instead of allowing "gouging", just make the product/service unavailable to all. Ain't "equality" great?
Sure. One of my employees who lives in far northwest Houston - about 120' above sea level - loaded up his car with his wife, mother, and a husky dog and tried to boogie to San Antonio.
SIX HOURS later, he was forty miles from home.
It was all the doggone transplants who heard about the hurricane, looked down, and said "Feet, make tracks!" Those of us who've been thru hurricanes stocked up on beer and strawberry pop-tarts, then enjoyed the show (there's something novel about watching a metal trash can sailing through the air at seventy miles per hour).
I thought of taking my generator, a handful of tools, and a bit of wire, to my local station. "I can get at least two to four pumps running. Fifty-dollars an hour."
$3000 to $6000? A neighbor had a 12KW Generac installed at his house. That was $7K. I suspect to power a gas station you're looking at a lot more than that. Still it seems like it might make sense to require new stations to have them as a public safety measure. Only problem with that is that new stations don't go up very often and unless you mandated it for a significant number of existing ones, it would take a very long time to do much good.
A free market solution would be to allow stations to charge whatever they feel like for gas in an emergency. If I had a station, I'd put in a generator and charge $1 a gallon more when the power is out. That would do several things. First it would make gas availabe during power outages. Second, it would pay for the generator installation, maintenance, etc. Third, it would discourage people from buying the gas during an emergency unless they really needed it.
OF course, our liberal friends call that price gouging and many places have laws that prevent anyone from doing it. So, the gas station has no generator, people have no gas, and the workers have the day off and don't get paid.
Why? Running a couple of pumps, a couple of lights, and the cash register would not take all that much. If it is connected to a convenience store with refrigeration, if you want to keep the compressor going for air, yes, that would take a lot.
You neighbor probably wants to keep the central AC going. 12kw is a lot of power. What does a gas pump need, maybe a quarter hp? Take a minimalist approach and cost will not be that bad.
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