Louisianans scramble to find fuel for generators after Ida

Louisiana residents are having trouble finding generators or fuel to power them, making it difficult for residents to cool their homes after enduring almost a week without electricity over hurricane Ida.

Ida’s severe winds knocked out power to more than one million homes and businesses. Unlike other recent fuel crunches, such as the ransomware attack that forced the Colonial Pipeline to shut in May, supply is not the only problem. Many gas stations are without power, keeping them from operating, and making it harder for residents to fill generators.

Nearly a dozen grain export terminals dotted along the Mississippi River from Baton Rouge to the Gulf of Mexico have been without power all week, disrupting export shipments from the country’s biggest grain exporting port.

More than two-thirds of stations were without fuel in Baton Rouge and New Orleans as of Friday, the most populous cities in the state.

After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, some Louisianans invested in natural gas generators, and they have been able to keep the lights on. Others have not been as fortunate.

In New Orleans, Aaron Lowe, 49, lined up on Thursday at a fuel station to wait for gasoline for the third straight day. He said he and many others braced for the storm by getting a generator, but finding gasoline has been difficult.

A construction worker, Lowe said, “I had to wait about 40 minutes today. I was waiting between two and four hours in the last couple of days.”

Lowe was at a Shell station on S. Claiborne Avenue in New Orleans, which was running on generators.

Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis said, “Station outages have not been a problem of supply, even as some oil producers and refiners in the region struggle to get up and running.
“There’s a lot of stations that have a lot of gasoline but can’t move it because they don’t have power,” he said.

About 860,000 homes and businesses in the state still lacked power as of Friday.

READ ALSO: New Orleans loses power due to Hurricane Ida

Kamila/Reuters