Petrol Prices

polopowah · Post by **polopowah** » Mon Sep 12, 2005 9:14 pm

hovering around the 96-98 mark here
but have seen 108.4 near portsmouth
-Ben-

metz · Post by **metz** » Mon Sep 12, 2005 9:48 pm

A mate of mines just rang to say shes stuck in a massive que to get in her local jet station and theres people fighting further down the que...when she actually got to the pumps they were empty!

Has the world gone crazy?
Its like on films where summat bads happening...damn my cars empty too!

*runs to grab an axe and go murder the neighbours incase they steal the last litre from the tank*

cyhliu · Post by **cyhliu** » Mon Sep 12, 2005 9:57 pm

Yeah a mate of mine texted to say he's queuing up and that I should get a tank full as we are planning a trip up north to Newcastle for Stag Weekend this weekend...ha ha ha, if they have a strike we might have to end up here in London...however going past plenty of stations, everywhere seems business as usually...I think you are going to get pockets of areas where rumours have spread...

GaryUK · Post by **GaryUK** » Mon Sep 12, 2005 10:07 pm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4236676.stm

Merseyside Police have asked people not to ring 999 to ask where to buy fuel after phone lines became strained.

WTF! How amazingly dense can some people be!

ModifiedMadness · Post by **ModifiedMadness** » Mon Sep 12, 2005 10:35 pm

There's a petrol station at the bottom of my road, and the junction to pull out onto the road it's on (if that makes sense) was blocked earlier because of people queing.

Tahrey1043 · Post by **Tahrey1043** » Tue Sep 13, 2005 3:33 am

AFAIK*, my local tesco is still 90.9p a litre - the cheapest available in about 20 miles - with the BP facing it wanting 94.9, both for vanilla 95RON. Time to make another quick trip to Machine Mart, this time to pick up one or two of their five-gallon WW2 style jerry cans, me thinks.

There's been crazymad queues bursting out of the site, which has caused total barmy chaos as the holdup at the petrol station (typically it's full of dicks who don't know which end of the pump to hold anyway, or to take the furthest forward pump if two are available on the same aisle... just the area i live in) led to complete gridlock around the entire retail complex - that has a MASSIVE tesco (i sh*t you not, it has two floors!), M&S foodhall, Boots, gym, dixons, next, etc etc. No one being able to get in or out of the shops because of all entrances and exits, plus a fair bit of the main road being chocka. In the end some bright spark in the shop figured out a way to use the goods entrance, staff car park, and a usually locked-up emergency gateway as a bypass and holding pattern to ease things a bit, but not by much.

Truly mental, as i bet if i was to go up there at 11.30 it'd be near deserted**. And there REALLY can't be that many locals needing to put petrol in all between 4.30 and 7.30pm... that's just the headless chicken "oh oh petrol might go up in price tomorrow, MUST GO GET SOME RIGHT OUT OF WORK" approach. The society we live in, unfortunately... never mind that the papers and radio all day have been non stop "panic buying at weekend pointless" (similar scenes on saturday**, but not as drastic) and "protesters promise to not blockade supplies", there's a sniff of a price rise or a protest and its like the worlds gonna collapse. Jeez people.... if your cars empty tomorrow morning and there's temporarily nothing at the station.... call in sick!

it was kinda like this... road on the left = a453 (jammed up enough at that time already, this really didnt help), main supermarket and it's main car park off the bottom right of the picture, with an exit-only route onto the a452, black arrows show one-ways, red ones the route that was opened. all the little coloured blobs are cars... what a mess. A literal bit of gridlocking, as people couldnt even properly leave the petrol station, meaning no more could enter it, and the whole thing fed back into itself. Crap design in the first place, of course.
(thanks to whoever posted the map, allowing this bit of one-hour-electromeditiation finger painting some legitimacy

for "clarity" i've omitted those driving out of the one-way entrance into the strip mall part of the site, and straight across the traffic and pavement central reservation to escape it all...)

* this means, "here's another term for you to look up"
** was similarly rubbish on saturday, but at 3.30am sunday morning, following a night shift, there were "only" two other people there, also with plastic one-litre jerrycans like i was.

Petrified · Post by **Petrified** » Sat Sep 17, 2005 6:55 pm

Yeyyy! Optimax 97p in Swansea.

Tahrey1043 · Post by **Tahrey1043** » Sat Sep 17, 2005 10:09 pm

metz wrote:A mate of mines just rang to say shes stuck in a massive que to get in her local jet station and theres people fighting further down the que...when she actually got to the pumps they were empty!

Has the world gone crazy?
Its like on films where summat bads happening...damn my cars empty too!

*runs to grab an axe and go murder the neighbours incase they steal the last litre from the tank*

"The Trigger Effect" was on ITV last night...... similar sort of thing but the power to all of LA got cut or something.

Which means no fridges to keep your food in
No power to run the petrol pumps*
No money out of the cash machines or any kind of card payment
...so scenes of people getting granpaw's 12-guage out of the cupboard to go rustle up six or seven precious gallons of gasoline to get themselves and their family far enough out of the county to hit somewhere that has a working power grid.
(that's an awful large area to have been knocked out that they need so much fuel..)

etc etc

scary stuff and it's appearance on the telly at that time can't just be a coincidence, with both the ongoing saga in new orleans, and the fuel shortage.

* cant remember the name of the book, but i remember reading some "classic" post apocalyptic thing at school (if it helps anyone give the title, the author died before the end and his wife finished it, and there was one girl in a valley town who ended up the sole survivor along with some russian nutter in a radiation suit) where once the power's off, there's description of the heroine using a manual jacking handle on the forecourt pumps to get fuel out to run a tractor... i should think there's probably similar capability even now, for emergency provision? (takes ages by hand, as the electric pumps shove it out at higher pressure than even the water mains, but its better than nothing)

laura_fairy_22 · Post by **laura_fairy_22** » Mon Sep 19, 2005 1:25 am

polopowah wrote:hovering around the 96-98 mark here
but have seen 108.4 near portsmouth
-Ben-

Whooooo portsmouth!!! We're on the map baby!!

Dropped back down to 89.9p in most places here!