Coming soon to your town

The feces are starting to hit the fan already, as towns in the south who receive much of their gasoline from the refineries battered by Hurricanes Gustav and Ike find themselves with no fuel:

A gas shortage that closed many stations Monday and left motorists in lines of up to an hour or more at others promises more of the same today.

And worse yet, there will no quick fix in the next several days, officials said.

“People are panicked,” said Marsha Messer, manager of the Roadrunner Shell station on Merrimon Avenue. Messer stood in the station’s parking lot Monday afternoon directing lines of cars.

“We’ve already had three fights today. That’s why we have the cops here, “ she said, pointing to Asheville police patrol cars parked to the side.

The shortages have spread across much of the Southeast as most the 15 Gulf Coast refineries shut down by Hurricanes Gustav and Ike have yet to come back on line, cutting the nation’s petroleum supply by 22 percent.

Some experts said Asheville’s relative remoteness from the Colonial Pipeline, the main artery for East Coast gasoline supplies, and sparse population compared with major metropolitan areas could be adding to the problem.

The pipeline reopened a week ago Sunday, albeit at a greatly reduced carrying rate, and some supplies are reaching the gasoline terminals in Spartanburg and Belton, S.C., that supply the mountains.

But some industry officials had as many questions as answers in trying to explain the problems Monday.

The article goes on to state that once you get out of the mountains, the supply problem is far less, and cites the higher cost of getting tanker trucks out there. But does it cost any more now than it did, say, a month ago?

Is it an accident, that the people who live in these regions are precisely the "white, working class voters" the McCain campaign desperately needs?

Drill Baby Drill indeed.