Every gas station ought to be required to have generators to make gas available in an electricity outage. This happens over and over. The EPA made every station install double-walled underground tanks for gasoline storage to avoid leakage, which cost thousands of dollars and put smaller stations out of business. But generators that would cost much less aren’t required. Crazy.
This lack of power for the pumps ought to be a concern of the Dept. of Homeland Security, because our enemies are watching this chaos and know exactly how dependent we are on our access to gasoline.
Not sure I like that. I do think they need to work on the power infrastructure and move to more underground feeds. Just too much of it is vulnerable to falling branches and trees. I know that is not cheap but neither is the restoration from these events. If the feds lightened up on regulations perhaps tpower companies would have more money for modernization.
A good idea, but sometimes the best laid plans . . . Back in the '80s, I worked in an oil camp in Venezuela. They were always having power outages due to large snakes shorting out the transformers or LARGE parrots roosting on power lines until they sagged and arced.
So . . .they got some 50 gallon drums of diesel and a backup generator. Sure enough, the power went out, so they went to start the generator. Oops, gas tank was empty. No problem, refill tank from drums. The only problem was that the transfer pump was electrically driven and nothing manual was handy.