Long Lines at Pumps as Some Run Dry

Signs informing customers of "no gas" began to appear at local stations Friday as people descended on the pumps en masse in advance of Hurricane Irene.

"I think it's over-hyped, but my wife sent me, so..." said Matthew Grosso of Stony Brook as he sat in his car in line at the Hess station on Stony Brook Road. "They say it's an emergency but it's so over-hyped that everybody is getting gas, so there's no gas. It's going to be a tropical storm by the time it gets here. Hurricane Gloria was a Category 2; this is only a Category 1 right now and it's still down south."

Such skepticism did not discourage a constant flow of other drivers from braving the rush – the line at the station stretched out each entrance and into the road on two sides.

Mary-Kate Skoulos sat in front of Grosso in the stream of idling cars. The Stony Brook University student said she could not find flashlights after looking in five separate stores. 

"Nowhere," she said. "We got a cooler – a styrofoam one, the last one they had at the third store we checked. Now we're waiting behind 30 cars to get gas."

As of 6 p.m., several area stations including the BP on Nesconset Highway and the Shell on Rt. 25A in East Setauket were completely out of gas. 

An employee at the BP station said a delivery was expected there in a few hours.

At the BP on Route 25A in East Setauket, employee Jim Aktac said the attendants had been busy filling tanks since noon on Friday. 

"We usually get a delivery once every three days or so," he said as a truck refueled the station outside. "We got one late last night, now this is our second."