Friday May 14th 2021
US capital is running out of fuel
Americans hoard gasoline after pipeline hack
Queues in front of US petrol stations, the trunk full of petrol cans: many Americans fear that the hacking attack on a pipeline will lose their petrol supply and buy fuel. Although President Biden speaks of a temporary bottleneck, many gas stations are running out of fuel.
After the cyber attack on the largest gasoline pipeline in the United States, panic buying and bottlenecks at gas stations have returned on the country’s east coast. The US capital Washington was particularly hard hit: on Thursday evening (local time) three out of four gas stations ran out of fuel, as Patrick De Haan from the market analysis company Gasbuddy announced on Twitter. In the state of North Carolina, 69 percent of the gas stations were without gas. In South Carolina, Virginia, and Georgia, roughly every second pump was out of order. Other states on the east coast also suffered from bottlenecks. Washington drivers desperately searched for fuel Thursday.
US President Joe Biden called on Americans not to “panic”. “Don’t buy more gasoline than you need in the next few days,” he said at the White House. The supply will soon return to normal. “Panic buying will only delay that.” Seeing queues at gas stations is scary, the US president admitted. The most important thing now is “not to panic”. Biden said the pipeline should be back in full capacity on Thursday, after which the bottlenecks should resolve by the weekend or early next week at the latest. This is a “temporary situation”, emphasized Biden.
The pipeline is very important to the US supply, it carries about 45 percent of all fuels consumed on the east coast. Blackmailers had paralyzed the pipeline of the operating company Colonial last Friday with a hacker attack. The pipeline’s operation came to a complete standstill, causing gasoline bottlenecks in parts of the country. The private operator of the pipeline had gradually resumed operations on Wednesday.
Biden said Thursday there was strong evidence that the attack originated in Russia. The US government does not assume that the Kremlin was involved. Much of the background to the cyber attack remains unclear. For example, it is unknown how much money the hacker group DarkSide, which is believed to be responsible for the attack, wanted to extort from Colonial. The company has so far also kept a low profile on whether ransom money has been paid at all. When asked about possible ransom payments on Thursday, Biden said: “I’m not commenting on that.”
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