HOUSTON — From Florida to Tennessee and all the way up to Connecticut, people far from Hurricane Ike’s destruction felt one of its tell-tale aftershocks: gasoline prices that surged overnight to nearly $5 a gallon in some places.
Fears of supply shortages, and actual fuel-production disruptions, resulting from Ike’s lashing of vital energy infrastructure led to pump-price disparities of as much as $1 a gallon in some states, and even on some blocks.
The price of regular gasoline soared as high as $4.99 a gallon in Knoxville, Tenn., on Saturday, up from $3.66 a day earlier. In Florida, the attorney general’s office reported prices as high as $5.50 a gallon in Tallahassee and said it had received 186 gouging complaints.
Ike shut down 14 Texas refineries with a total capacity of 3.8 million barrels of crude a day, or about 20 percent of the country’s total output. However, the center of the storm appeared to miss the vital concentration of oil and petrochemical refineries in the Houston area. The Associated Press
