Jason Sandford
Jason Sandford is a reporter, writer, blogger and photographer interested in all things Asheville.
Here’s a sobering perspective, well expressed, from Ashvegas loyal reader Daisy:
This is starting to concern me seriously as well. Most of the people I know already had their budgets stretched to the max and were already carpooling, cutting back on food, shopping, etc… With so many people already paycheck to paycheck, one weekend of little or no income will be VERY hard for many service workers to recover from.
I called our elected officials at the state level today and stressed to them that the economy here is about one day from screeching to a halt. I am a nurse and do partial home care. Most of my non-clinical co-workers have 1-2 days of gas left and several clinicians are at less than 1/2 tank in their work vehicles. My husband has his own HVAC business and has about an 1/8 of a tank, so it’s looking like the job to start Thursday and two smaller ones to be done over the weekend will be put on hold.
I got in one line tonight and waited about ten minutes with no movement, asked the guy in front of me to keep moving my car up for me, ran up to the station and was informed the hope was dim as far back as I was, about 50 cars.
This could very easily create a spiral of hours being cut for many people who are already in economic dire straits. The govenors office acted indignant that I would dare to bother them with such a trivial matter. Shockingly, Shuler’s office had a polite, somewhat informative individual that suggested things should be “getting better” next week. We’ll see.
It would be awfully reassuring if someone would, gee, I don’t know, have a press conferance or something. I am beyond disappointed at the lack of leadership concerning this issue, but not surprised being a big fan of Naomi Klien. I guess it’s just another bullet for the middle class to bite.
Yeah, I compare it to what a real crisis might look like too, and it doesn’t look good for us. People, as it turns out, are kinda shitty.
I saw this and wondered if I had written you in some sort of fugue state or something. I’m a nurse too, but no HVAC husband (yet).
As far as conspiracy theories, we’re a pretty liberal area. I bet alot more people that don’t pay much attention are starting to think the mantra "drill, baby, drill" is sounding pretty good.
doesn’t sound crazy, Former. you make an excellent point.
Ash, here’s a new angle to think about: In an odd way, the gas ‘crisis’ is not unlike the situation we’d experience in the event of pandemic flu.
Not that long ago the big fear was of bird flu or a similar highly contagious flu. We were all urged to prepare accordingly — as in, have food on hand, figure out how to work from home, etc. We were even advised to figure out how to school our children from home — all in order to contain the virus by, in effect, quarantining everyone from each other.
Sounds crazy, but we could consider the gasoline shortage to be practice for such a situation….stay home and learn how to survive without running around all over the place.