State issues emergency rule to ease gas crunch in wake of South Florida floods

Drivers wait in line for gasoline in Altamonte Springs, Fla., ahead of the anticipated arrival of Hurricane Irma, Wednesday, Sept. 6, 2017. Irma roared into the Caribbean with record force early Wednesday, its 185-mph winds shaking homes and flooding buildings on a chain of small islands along a path toward Puerto Rico, Cuba and Hispaniola and a possible direct hit on densely populated South Florida. (Joe Burbank/Orlando Sentinel via AP)

Agriculture Commissioner Wilton Simpson issued an emergency rule to help ease the fuel shortage caused by South Florida’s flooding,.

A news release the state Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services issued blamed the feds for the holdup.

“Florida finally receives (Environmental Protection Agency) waiver requested by Gov. (Ron) DeSantis and Commissioner Simpson,” the release says.

Earlier this month, a meteorological event that is being called a “rain bomb” shattered the state’s record for rainfall within a 24-hour period. The deluge closed Port Everglades for 36 hours.

The port is the hub for 40% of the state’s gasoline distribution. The downpour caused a backlog of demand, but not all the gas terminals were operating a week after the flood.

Some DeSantis surrogates were on Twitter blaming South Florida’s panic-buying for gas stations running out of fuel, but the FDACS release argued fault lies with the feds’ delay in giving the state permission to access a larger market of available fuel.

The Governor and the Commissioner Wednesday asked for the waiver to allow the fuel industry greater flexibility to sell winter blend fuel until May 1 in Broward County, it was explained in the Friday release announcing the new fuel being made available.

The EPA waiver issued Friday “is a good step in the right direction,” Simpson said in a prepared statement. “While it falls short of the state’s request to waive the requirement in counties where key ports and transportation routes are located, there is still time for the Biden Administration to expand the waiver.”

Media outlets showed pictures of motorists in lines that snaked around blocks. The Division of Emergency Management sent 500,000 gallons of fuel that started to arrive on Tuesday, as a real-time blog on GasBuddy.com showed shortages peaked Tuesday, when 63.5% of service stations in the Fort Lauderdale/Miami area were out of gas.

The situation was frustrating enough that Sen. Marco Rubio took to Twitter to vent. He stopped short of pinning the blame on anyone, but recorded a video of himself on Wednesday declaring, “This should have been figured out by now.”

Not much later, Republican U.S. Sen. Rick Scott issued his own call to arms because of the situation.

“Every resource available should be deployed to fix this,” he said on Twitter, retweeting the GasBuddyGuy’s take on the situation.

The Florida Democratic Party, meanwhile, seemed to be taking credit for Republicans’ awareness of the situation. The party also sought to fuel a recollection that DeSantis issued a state of emergency for the flooding from out of state, as he visited the presidential battleground state Ohio.

“The comments from Scott and Rubio come after Florida Democratic Party Chair Nikki Fried hosted a press conference with local leaders and impacted individuals in Fort Lauderdale earlier this week to slam DeSantis for traveling out of state while people in South Florida continued to deal with the catastrophic flooding, “ the release said.