Thursday AM September 25th, 2008

The volume of deliveries hasn’t gone down, even over a week after Hurricane Ike. And now deliveries are being made into Galveston. J.J. Isbell is president of Texas Transeastern, and says they’re calling on drivers from all over Texas to pick up the slack, working extra shifts and overtime to make deliveries.

“Well, you know, supply has been an issue at different times, and we’ve brought product in from San Antonio and Corpus and Dallas and Beaumont in to help, help relieve some of the pressure in the Houston market. We’ve brought drivers in from all our locations in to help in Houston, and that’s part of our, that’s part of our hurricane preparedness, is we have folks in all of our locations that come to wherever, whatever the affected area is to help out.”

Isbell says the loss of power also affected the gasoline delivery business.

“And a lot of the loading racks, where we need to go get the gas–they lose power. So we had a large amount of our trucks that were loaded, as as soon as the hurricane was over, they were on the streets filling stations up, and we didn’t have to wait for the racks to come back up. So that was a big, that was something we learned from last time.”

Isbell says the fill-up patterns are changing.

“Well, everybody needed gas at the same time after the hurricane, and now people will need it as they need it, in a normal flow, because people are getting back into going to school and going to work and doing the normal things, so that it’ll be, I think, a more even flow now, as long as we don’t have some kind of supply problem. Like everybody had got their cars filled up and enough stations got open that it took the pressure off last Thursday.”

Isbell says his drivers were being honked at like rock stars.

“You know, in this type of deal, these gasoline truck drivers are almost like first responders. They’ve put their personal lives aside, and whatever happened to their house and their families aside and they’ve come to work to get gas delivered to these stores because Like I’ve said before, it’s one of the essentials that we have to have to operate.”

Texas Transeastern transports gasoline for Valero, Shell Oil, Murphy Oil and others.

Ed Mayberry, KUHF Houston Public Radio News.