Gasoline remained hard to find on Friday across the west coast of Florida, especially in the Tampa-St. Petersburg area, where power outages, port closures and mass evacuations had left many gas pumps without fuel or unable to operate.
Long gas lines added to the frustration of Florida residents in hard-hit places, who navigated down streets without traffic lights and around fallen trees and snapped electric poles in the search for fuel.
“Why are we out of gas at the gas stations?” said Simon Levell, 61, at his home in Englewood, Fla., northwest of Fort Myers, which flooded during both Milton and Hurricane Helene two weeks ago. “The gas stations should not be out of gas,” he said.
Gov. Ron DeSantis insisted that there wasn’t an actual fuel shortage, but acknowledged that it might seem that way. “If you don’t have a generator, those pumps won’t operate,” he said at a news conference.
Two million customers across Florida remained without power on Friday afternoon, and about a quarter of those outages were in Hillsborough County, where Tampa is. The region was spared from the devastating storm surge that officials had feared, but Milton still left damaged houses and twisted power lines.
GasBuddy, a company that tracks fuel prices and availability, said gas was unavailable at more than three-quarters of the stations in the Tampa region on Friday afternoon. Fuel was also hard to come by around Sarasota, Fort Myers and Naples, the company said.
Statewide, things were better, though gas was unavailable at nearly 30 percent of stations.
The problems actually started in the days before Milton came ashore, as residents filled up their tanks and gas cans in anticipation of outages or when ordered to flee. Millions of people took to the highways earlier this week in one of the largest evacuations in Florida history, helping drain stations dry.
Spartan in Tarpon Springs, outside Tampa, did have power to dispense fuel after the storm, but tried to ration it. At first, customers could buy at most $30 worth. The station then lowered the limit to $20. Within an hour and a half, the gas ran out.
Some people were so desperate that they followed a fuel truck to the station on Friday, said Crystal Stoffel, a cashier there.
Florida officials said they were working to keep gasoline flowing by replenishing stations, using the state’s fuel reserves, and placing generators at certain stations to operate pumps. Kevin Guthrie, Florida’s emergency management director, said the state had released about 140,000 gallons of fuel to about 20 stations.
Outages at gas stations — even at the scale Florida is experiencing — are common after hurricanes, said Tom Kloza, global head of energy analysis at Oil Price Information Service. Most fuel distribution in the state should return to normal by the middle of next week, he said.
As of Friday afternoon, roughly a dozen tankers laden with fuel were headed for ports around Florida, Mr. Kloza said. He added that some vessels were waiting for fuel distribution terminals to reopen after losing power.
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