Not fueling around: Rick Scott rips Florida’s ‘ridiculous’ gas shortages during and after Milton

Gas shortages are starting to ease, despite many stations remaining closed.

Florida’s former Governor is offering another indirect critique of his replacement’s storm response.

During an interview on the “Ryan Gorman Show,” U.S. Sen. Rick Scott slammed the slow pace of gas returning to the system in the aftermath of Hurricane Milton.

“We finally have gas back in our gas stations,” Scott said. “That took a ridiculous amount of time.”

Gov. Ron DeSantis was compelled to take extraordinary measures to resolve what he called a distribution problem to bring fuel supply back to heavily populated Southwest Florida. Petroleum at the pump there was depleted even before the storm hit as evacuees filled roads to get out of town, and the shortage of fuel only exacerbated the stress.

Gas shortages and power outages at gas stations in the Tampa-St. Petersburg area and points south led to the establishment of public fuel depots, which created the spectacle in some places of people burning fuel during long waits for their 10-gallon allotment. Meanwhile, DeSantis blamed current law for a “loophole” that allowed gas stations not to have generators as required by law, but suggested that changing that would be a “Venezuela” type intervention.

This is only the latest subtle but unmistakable critique of DeSantis by Scott.

Last week, he contended that property insurance rates had “skyrocketed in the last six years” since the current Governor took office and are “not going to get any better” in the wake of Hurricane Milton’s unprecedented destruction.

Those in Scott’s orbit also have taken issue with DeSantis’ assertion that no Governor before him had staged power restoration assets, such as crews of linemen and equipment from other areas, even as mutual aid agreements have been a staple of storm response for many years.