LARGO - Customers with hurricane anxiety streamed into Maroun Jalo's B.P. Amoco station Friday afternoon, draining his tanks. With less than 2,500 gallons on hand - barely a two-hour supply - he whipped out a phone and asked when a supply truck could arrive.
"Probably sometime tomorrow, Sunday or Monday," someone replied.
"Holy cow," Jalo responded.
Spurred by a false rumor about rationing, thousands of drivers sucked the pumps dry Friday at gas stations throughout the Tampa Bay area and Florida. Although supply trucks continued to work around the clock, many stations ran out of fuel, some only had regular grade, and others dealt with long lines of nervous customers.
"Never have I ever seen it like this," said Jim Smith, president of the Florida Petroleum Marketers and Convenience Store Association.
Echoed Jalo at his Ulmerton Road station: "I'm from New Jersey, we have snow. It never happened like this."
Gov. Jeb Bush and other state officials fought to beat down a rumor that gasoline would be rationed to 5 gallons per person. They said it was wrong, impossible and unenforceable.
"One of the rumors I heard today, an urban legend, I guess, that has cropped up in Tampa and maybe now has crossed the state is that somehow the governor of the state was going to ration gasoline to either $5 - which would get you about 2 gallons these days - or 5 gallons of gas, and that's news to me," Bush said.
"It's not true and it's not going to happen," he added, saying he would make sure gasoline is available on evacuation routes.
"It's completely unfounded," said Department of Environmental Protection Secretary Colleen M. Castille, who spent a large part of her day talking on television and radio and sending out fax messages "to try and quell the rumor."
The origin of the rumor was unclear. But it was so pervasive that clerks at some stations said they had thought it was true.
A Rally station on Fourth Street N in St. Petersburg posted memos asking customers to limit their gasoline purchases to $25, but officials said such requests were up to individual businesses.
Many customers said they heard supplies were short because so many customers wanted to refuel before Hurricane Ivan approaches.
"It's like a parking lot," said Rhonda Whitman, 45, a house cleaner, after pulling up to one of the many empty pumps at a Sunoco station on the corner of U.S. 19 and 116th Avenue in Pinellas Park. She passed another station in Clearwater that looked too busy, only to discover the Sunoco had no gas.
It's not the first time manager Ray Brady has seen gas in short supply, "but nothing like this. Everyone's panicked," he said.
The Busch Boulevard Citgo in Tampa ran out of gas at the height of rush hour, and customers took it "so bad, so bad," said owner Paul Hamed. But he was lucky. A resupply truck arrived shortly afterward and he expected to be selling gas again within an hour.
Smith, of the petroleum association, blamed the rumor for the shortages but said there were several other factors. Many stations ran low at the end of August, because drivers filled their tanks in the final days of the gas tax holiday.
Hurricanes Charley and Frances also disrupted distribution temporarily in some areas. And Smith mentioned one other issue: Gas stations in highly populated counties such as Pinellas and Hillsborough are required by law to sell a more refined form of gasoline in May through September than in rural counties. This complicates resupply in these months, he said.
But state officials said since Hurricane Frances made landfall, fuel companies had distributed more than 500-million gallons of fuel in five days, compared to a monthly average of 750-million gallons.
Times staff writers Joni James and Alisa Ulferts contributed to this report.
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