GREENVILLE — The day Tropical Storm Helene tore through the Carolinas, widespread power outages rendered gas stations dark and empty.
Without power or a backup generator, gas couldn't be pumped, sparking a wave of panic buying that appears to have since subsided, although officials urged the public to only buy enough gas that they truly need.
Some of the worst-hit places, like the mountainous rural expanse of Western North Carolina, had roads washed away, blocking access to resupply gas stations in those parts. But experts maintained that Upstate South Carolina has gas access.
“There are no problems in the supply chain,” said Patrick De Haan, a national expert on oil and gasoline markets and head analyst at GasBuddy. “Unlike a lot of hurricanes that can damage refineries and cause them to shut down, there's really no refineries that were in the path of this.”
Greenville County Sheriff Hobart Lewis told the public over the weekend that there are no food or fuel shortages and that resupply routes to the Upstate remain open.
There’s fuel flowing through the Colonial Pipeline’s 5,500-mile system that runs from Houston to New Jersey, De Haan said, and truckers can still refuel their tankers.
“If people are diminishing or depleting the supply at local stations, well, that's going to stress the network,” De Haan said. “That's what makes the situation worse.”
Despite the power outages, fuel never stopped flowing through the “superhighway” of pipelines that meander up the Southeast from the Gulf through the Mid-Atlantic, said Stewart Spinks, founder of Greenville-based Spinx gas stations.
However, power cut off at the Spartanburg and Belton terminals for about 16 hours where tankers fill up their trucks before heading out to resupply gas stations in the community, Spinks said.
“It's very unusual for the power to go down in both of our (terminals),” Spinks said.
That meant fuel shipments that Spinx, which serves about 20 percent of Greenville County, had ordered to be sent from the Gulf passed by South Carolina, losing about a day’s worth of supply but have recovered to about 80 percent of their typical levels and expect to be back to normal in the afternoon Oct. 1.
Stewart Spinks, founder of the Spinx gas station chain, was honored Aug. 9 by dedicating the street where he opened his first store in 1972 in Greenville.
“If we lose one day, then it's gonna cause a little skip in the heartbeat of supply, and we are just one company,” Spinks said.
At the height of the outage, Spinx lost power at 46 of its 90 stations. Regular fuel was available at 80 of them around 4:30 p.m. Sept. 30, Spinks said.
They placed some emergency generators at distant locations spread out across the Upstate, including at a Travelers Rest location and the hilly locations in Dacusville in Pickens County and Gowensville in Greenville County.
On Sept. 28, more than 50 cars crawled along the right lane of northbound Greenville Street midday in Anderson, one of the Upstate communities hardest hit by Tropical Storm Helene.
Flowing petroleum has become a rarity in the Upstate, as power outages have limited options for low-on-fuel drivers. A day after Helene wreaked havoc, waits for fuel at gas stations across the Upstate pushed 30 minutes, even an hour sometimes.