The U.S. Department of Transportation issued an emergency declaration for four northeastern states – New York, New Jersey, Delaware and Pennsylvania – after an outage at one of the largest underground heating fuel storage facilities in the region threatened to disrupt deliveries during the recent severe cold snap, Bloomberg reported Monday.
The DoT’s declaration waived regulations on how long drivers can remain at the wheel without rest as they distribute propane to thousands of customers in the four states, after the governors of New Jersey and Pennsylvania already had waived state-level trucking restrictions, seeking to avert a prolonged disruption to heating fuel distribution that could cause price spikes.
The problems are the result of a November 19 electrical outage at a transformer at Energy Transfer’s (ET) Marcus Hook terminal in Pennsylvania, which disabled the facility’s ability to load propane on trucks for three days and led the company to declare force majeure, according to the National Propane Gas Association.
The terminal is loading propane onto trucks directly from a pipeline, causing wait times to increase, and access has been limited to 12 hours per day, Pennsylvania Propane Association Executive Director Shelby Bell told Bloomberg.
Normally, propane is distributed from Energy Transfer’s (ET) massive underground storage caverns around the clock and picked up by ~200 trucks per day.