Gas station summit tries to avert crises in Boca

By Chuck McGinness

Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

Saturday, May 20, 2006

"It's going to be a lot better this year," he said.

Other gas station owners and operators in the city expressed similar confidence during a meeting Friday with city officials to gauge the state of preparedness in the event South Florida gets hammered again.

In Boca Raton and throughout South Florida in the days after Wilma, people waited in long lines for hours to get rationed supplies of fuel at the scattered stations that were open.

"Hopefully, we'll be able to have people go to neighborhood gas stations and not drive all over South Florida looking for gas," Mayor Steven Abrams said.

Operators of corporate-owned stations said they've been assured that stockpiles of generators are on hand and will be sent here if needed.

Most independent owners are like Pearson and have bought portable generators.

It costs about $4,000 to wire a gas station for a generator, and the unit can be from $2,500 to more than $30,000, depending on the number of pumps and if the owner also wants to keep the mini-mart and repair shop running.

Of Florida's roughly 9,600 gas stations, about 5,300 are independently owned or run by small retail chains. About 20 percent of the independent stations statewide should be generator-ready by June, said Jim Smith, president of the Florida Petroleum Marketers Association.

And then there's Morty Dranoff, who's getting a $35,000 permanent generator for free at his Mizner Park Citgo.

"I'm first in line," said H.J. Frank, who sells and services emergency generators and is donating Dranoff's. "It's good for me as a first responder and my way of trying to help the community out."

One reason for calling Friday's Boca gas station summit was to ask operators for their cooperation in giving priority to police, fire-rescue and other city emergency crews.

Last year, the city partnered with four stations, rotating generators to keep city vehicles on the road.

A few days after Wilma, things got pretty uneasy, Municipal Services Director Bob DiChristopher said. The city's diesel fuel tanks were nearly empty.

Police officers had to go to Port Everglades to escort fuel tankers back to the city, DiChristopher said.

"I was open until I ran out of gas," said Ira Winters, owner of Spanish River Chevron. "The port stopped delivery."

A number of factors, including the lack of power at port terminals, combined to create the crises after Wilma, the marketers association's Smith said.

Local governments need to be more aggressive in reminding residents to gas up before a hurricane and to stay off the roads after the storm, he said.

Some local cities passed laws requiring new gas stations and ones that are remodeled to have backup generators.

West Palm Beach is giving station owners up to $5,000 to install permanent generators.

Among the hurricane preparation measures that state lawmakers adopted this year is one that would require all owners of 10 or more gas stations in a single county to have at least one portable generator.

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