Trucker Shortages Exacerbate Colonial Pipeline Fiasco

As news of the Colonial Pipeline shutdown sent consumers up and down the East Coast into a gas-guzzling frenzy, distributors facing months-long driver shortages suddenly found themselves in a real pinch.

Such was the case with Georgia Tank Lines, a local tanker company located in Doraville, northeast of Atlanta. According to operations director Slade Casey, a 25-year veteran in the business, some of the stations serviced by the company’s 35 drivers were going through gas at a clip nine times faster than the usual rate.

“There’s a station down the road that normally goes through 9,000 gallons in 72 hours. And right now, they going through 9,000 gallons in about eight hours,” Casey told National Review. “Nobody can staff for that, it’s just hard.”

Casey’s diagnosis of the issue matched with industry experts like Patrick De Haan of GasBuddy have been seeing: stations were running out of gas not because of supply shortages, but because of a demand surge.

“There seems to be enough product to go around, we’re still being able to put products on trucks and take it to stations, we just can’t keep up with the public,” Casey explained. “And then once we get to the station we can’t get the truck in the parking lot.”

Long lines at gas stations throughout the Southeast led to high percentages of drained pumps in metro areas like Atlanta, Charlotte, and even Washington, D.C. One worker at a Shell station Atlanta, which only had diesel left, told National Review that while a usual week will see pumps get refilled two or three times, as of Wednesday the station still had not received a single shipment.

But with the resumption of the Pipeline — reportedly after a $5 million ransom payment to hacking group Darkside — fears of shortages, spiking prices, and viral videos of people trying to pump gas into shopping bags should be short-lived.

For Casey and the gas trucking industry, however, the recent crisis only further highlights a longstanding driver shortage.

“There’s not enough drivers in the industry to keep up with the panic buying that’s going on and the increased demand,” he said. “We seemed like we were in good shape in March, and for whatever reason it just seemed like it hit us mid-March.”

“I’ve been doing this 25 years, and you can normally see this coming. But for whatever reason, the bottom fell out of it mid-March, and everyone in the industry is kind of shaking their head and we don’t know why,” he added.

Mid-March is precisely when the Democrats extended enhanced unemployment — an extra $300-per-week — through September as part of a COVID-relief package. Casey attributed the lack of drivers mostly to a dearth of qualified youngsters and a rising tide of retiring veterans, who are fed up with the industry’s increasing emphasis on technology in the cab — but the extra money from Uncle Sam may also be keeping some would-be drivers on the couch.

In its analysis of the April jobs report, the freight network Convoy said that the recent drop in employed drivers “adds further fuel to the idea that something isn’t working in the labor market for truckers.”

Convoy found that “recruitment and retention” is the “main” driver of the industry’s labor shortage. “New driver inflows are well below historic norms,” the analysis states.

When states such as Massachusetts are paying the unemployed $22-per-hour — which is coincidentally the median trucking wage — it makes sense that some potential drivers would choose to stay home instead of getting behind the wheel.

Casey said he thinks wages are playing a factor in the lack of available candidates.

“I think the pay for drivers has not kept pace with the rest of the industry, and so it’s something that we’re faced with — how do we pay our drivers? But then again, we also have to have customers pay more so we can afford to pay drivers more. It’s a never ending battle,” he admitted.

Following the Colonial Pipeline shutdown, the Department of Transportation and multiple states issued emergency declarations to allow drivers to go beyond their typical workload — 70-hour-a-week shifts before a 34-hour break. But Casey explained that even while some drivers are happy to work longer, the job becomes very dangerous if drivers are pushed too long without rest.

“There does become a factor where these guys need to [rest], we actually have two guys we have to pull out of the truck, they got to take a day off,” he said. “They’ll just work themselves to death and then accidents happen.”

A recent report from the National Tank Truck Carriers, an industry trade group, found that “trucking’s driver shortage already exceeds 50,000 drivers,” with multiple news articles before the pipeline hack suggesting a possible gas shortage this summer as a result.