In addition to 1970s-era rationing, a series of critical developments behind the scenes — like emergency deliveries to gas stations and the impending return of a major refinery — have worked to ease a fuel shortage that had threatened to disrupt travel during Thanksgiving week.
Lines at gas stations have largely disappeared in New York City and on Long Island, where rationing was put in place late last week, and in New Jersey, where it was lifted this week, but the region's tangled supply network of refineries, ports and terminals is still not close to operating normally as the difficult work to recover from Hurricane Sandy continues
As a result, industry and government officials have resorted to creative means of getting gasoline to stations whose usual supply stream has dried up.
Gasoline and diesel-fuel distributors have dispatched trucks from out of state to refuel New York area stations that have been unable to get gas from terminals damaged by the storm. Those deliveries have been supplemented by federal and state agencies, which have provided more than 2.3 million gallons to gas stations to keep them open.
"I think it's very resourceful of them; otherwise, we'd be out of business," said Andrew Harris, the owner of a Shell station in Jericho, on Long Island, which received 14,000 gallons last weekend from the federal and state effort. "If my regular supplier can't deliver, what am I going to do? Should I just go under?"
Irving Oil Corporation, based in Canada, is also preparing to reopen a giant refinery in St. John, New Brunswick, that will produce more than 12 million gallons of refined petroleum products a day, over half of which is consumed in the Northeast.
The Canadian plant had undergone a major maintenance operation that lasted several weeks and tightened gasoline supplies in the New York metropolitan area even before the storm hit.
Tom Kloza, senior oil analyst at the Oil Price Information Service, said the reopening of the Canadian refinery was "very important, since it is the most critical refinery in the Northeast because they make so much reformulated gasoline, the cleanest gasoline that is required in New Jersey and New York."
But the efforts to shore up gas supplies have not been without challenges.
When the storm knocked out power to the Buckeye pipeline, an important link carrying fuel between New Jersey and Long Island and other areas, New York State officials connected a temporary generator that kept five million gallons of fuel a day flowing. But at one point the generator was turned off by the operator of a terminal on the line said Howard B. Glaser, the director of state operations for Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo who has helped oversee the state's response to the hurricane.
"We had to call the chairman of Shell Oil and threaten to seize the terminal if they didn't turn the generator back on in minutes," Mr. Glaser said. Within 10 minutes, it was back online.
Even as the focus has been on restoring power to gas stations and figuring out how to provide them with gas, fuel prices in New York have climbed, oil analysts said. The average price for a gallon of regular gasoline in the state on Wednesday was $3.99, 45 cents above the national average and even 15 cents above California, where gasoline prices are normally much higher than in New York.
Industry executives said they started diverting trucks from other routes to the New York area last week. One supplier, Mansfield, based in Gainesville, Ga., said it was sending trucks filled with gasoline from Georgia, North Carolina, Ohio, South Carolina and Virginia; one truck traveled 600 miles with 8,500 gallons of gasoline for emergency vehicles. Such efforts helped take pressure off terminals that had been delivering so much gas to firefighters, police departments and hospitals that they had limited supplies for the public.
"We've been hauling gasoline from several different states," said Kristin Sanderson, a Mansfield marketing manager. "We did the same for Louisiana a few years ago" after Hurricane Katrina hit the New Orleans area.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Defense Logistics Agency have also provided gas and diesel fuel to New York, New Jersey and Connecticut to keep gas stations open. The distribution benefited as many as 30 stations a day in New York alone.
Hess said it was preparing to restart operations at its Port Reading, N.J., refinery, which turns out 2.9 million gallons a day of fuel products for the region. Power was knocked out at that refinery, and the nearby Phillips 66 refinery in Linden, N.J., which is not expected to resume operations for another two weeks or so.
But industry experts warned that a full recovery of gasoline supplies was still weeks away, largely because of continuing repairs to the cluster of terminals around Linden, where barges and trucks load fuel to deliver throughout the region.
"Every day there is a little progress," said James Benton, executive director of the New Jersey Petroleum Council, a trade group, who estimated that more than a dozen of the state's roughly 20 terminals serving the metropolitan region were now running, although not all at full capacity. The rest were still out of commission.
Sal Risalvato, the executive director of the NJGCA, formerly the New Jersey Gasoline Retailers Association, said the result has been that stations that normally received deliveries of 8,500 gallons had to settle for 2,000 or 3,000 gallons as distributors tried to serve as many stations as possible.
Still, the shortage had eased enough on Wednesday that some drivers in New York City were calling for an end to the rationing system, which restricts gasoline sales to even-numbered cars on even days and odd-numbered on odd days. It also remained in effect in Nassau and Suffolk Counties.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg signed an order on Tuesday extending the rationing for another five days, until 6 a.m. on Monday. That was too long for one driver.
"I believe in things like this when the crisis is in hand," Mark Bottitta, 48, said as he filled up at a Hess station in Brooklyn. "Once the crisis is resolved, it's not necessary to continue."
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