Queue must be joking: Floridians rush out to panic buy fuel despite being unaffected by pipeline problem
Long queues for petrol formed in Florida today as locals rushed out to panic buy fuel, despite being largely unaffected by the Colonial Pipeline outage.
For the last few days residents in Tallahassee, a city in Floria, have rushed to fill up their vehicles with petrol, causing a local shortage of fuel, news website the Tallahassee Democrat reported.
People are worried they will be affected by the current cyberattack on America’s biggest pipeline, however, most Florida fuel does not come through the pipeline, instead it gets most of its fuel via ocean tankers from the Gulf of Mexico, making it less reliant on the pipeline to maintain supplies.
Photo journalist Alicia Devine uploaded a video of the enormous queue for petrol she found herself in this morning, adding: “I’ve visited five gas stations this morning and the Costco one is the first to have gas. The line is insane.”
She later tweeted that even a Costco employee did not know where the line for petrol ended.
What’s going on with the pipeline?
Today marked the fifth day that the US’s biggest fuel pipeline was shut down, following an attack by hackers.
Colonial Pipeline said it was working toward a substantial restart of operations by the end of this week after a cyberattack forced it to cease operations on Friday, choking off nearly half of the East Coast’s fuel supply and underscoring the vulnerability of US energy infrastructure to hackers.
The FBI has accused a shadowy criminal gang called DarkSide, believed to be based in Russia or Eastern Europe, of the ransomware attack.
Russia’s embassy in the United States today rejected speculation that Moscow was responsible for the attack.
Yesterday President Joe Biden said there was no evidence so far that Russia’s government was involved, but said there was evidence that the culprits’ ransomware was in Russia.
Ransomware is a type of malware designed to lock computers by encrypting data and demanding payment to regain access.
A statement issued in DarkSide’s name on Monday said: “Our goal is to make money, and not creating problems for society.”
It is unknown how much money the hackers are seeking, and Colonial has not commented on whether it would pay.