More gas eases panic buying

Joyce Baker has noticed that the long lines and complaining customers she saw the past couple of weeks at the Washington Road gas station where she works have subsided.

"It looks like all of that is better now," Ms. Baker, a clerk at the Kroger gas station, said Friday. She said the station hasn't had a gas outage in a week.

Shipments of gas along the pipeline from the Gulf Coast are reaching the area again, said Jim Tudor, the president of the Georgia Association of Convenience Stores. He hopes this will curb the "pandemonium" over gas availability.

"This will be over when the people believe it is over. To the extent that people are willing to believe that there will be gas tomorrow and that impacts what they do today, that goes a long way toward allowing the system to return to normal," Mr. Tudor said. "People will use normal filling patterns."

Stevie Boyd, of Edgefield, S.C., said she never bought into the panic, but at one point she was filling up her tank three times a week.

"Where I live they would only allow you to get $20 worth," she said. "I can tell everybody's calmed down, because they let up on the gas limits."

Aiding in that perception is the arrival of gasoline for Shell stations at Circle K, which is the largest chain in the area.

The supply situation has not returned to normal levels, however. John Butler, the president of Koger-Walters Oil Co. in Augusta, said 17 of the 21 gas stations his company supplies are still dry.

"We haven't delivered gas in two days," he said. "We're hoping that things will pick up today and we'll have more product to deliver."

Mr. Butler said he believes it will be another week before his supply is back to normal.

Houston-area refineries that were knocked out of commission by Hurricane Ike three weeks ago have restarted, according to the Department of Energy, though many are not operating at full production capacity.

Mr. Tudor, who is based in Atlanta, said most of the major companies are at near-normal fuel supply allocation in the Atlanta area.

"My retailers tell me that the pandemonium and the panic buying seems to have subsided," he said. "People have returned to more normal filling patterns, which will allow more people to have gas."

Reach Tim Rausch at (706) 823-3352.

Reach Stephanie Toone at (706) 823-3215.