In the UK, gasoline shortages worsened in the south of the country

The ninth day of the UK petrol shortage, Saturday 2 October. Joey was lucky. This morning, the gas station next to his home in Brockwell Park in south London dried up. But, a little later, he found out the beginning of the activity: the refueling was just done. “I rushed to refuel, before the line got too long.” Since then, rumors have spread of a full gas station and the line of cars stretched dozens of meters. Joey’s wife, a high school teacher, needs her car to get to the college where she works, 45 minutes away, and the tank had to be refilled.

A mile down the road at Streatham Hill, another gas station hasn’t had the same luck. ‘No fuel’, denote the tag in uppercase letters. A priori, no supplies are expected today, according to the director. “But go up the street, at the other station, there’s gas.”, assures the customer, like trust.

So has life in the UK since September 23, when the gasoline shortage began. Everyone passes at the correct addresses where fuel has just been delivered, and service stations experience the effects of the accordion: huge queues form immediately after each refueling, quickly emptying tanks, causing new shortages.

Quarter of dry gas stations

The UK is not so much paralyzed as simply embarrassed. With good research, we end up finding gasoline. London and the southeast of England are more affected than the rest of the country; The situation there even worsened on Saturday, according to the Gasoline Retailers Association, which accounts for two-thirds of stations across the country. In central and northern England, Scotland and Wales, problems began to recede. A quarter of the stations were completely dry on Friday, and another quarter had no fuel at all levels. Monday, two hundred soldiers, including one hundred truck drivers, He’ll step in to try and make things better.

Gasoline shortage in the UK is the result of a “perfect storm”, to use the English expression. As elsewhere, the pandemic has disrupted logistics chains: hard-to-obtain electronic chips, shortages of raw materials, delays in container deliveries, etc.

Added to this is Britain’s exit from the European Union. During the pandemic, hundreds of thousands of Europeans have returned to their countries of origin to experience containment, and many have not returned. Since 1^{He is} January, it is no longer possible to work without a visa, a document given only from an annual salary of 25,600 pounds (30,000 euros).

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