Snow Can’t Cover Up Gripes Over Fuel Prices

Despite a fresh blast of heavy snow, there’s plenty of heat in the socked-in sections of the country. Pop into any truck stop along I-78, and you can warm your hands by the red-hot faces of truckers watching diesel prices outrun their odometers. Or the steam rising from people on fixed incomes, who are turning down their thermostats to avoid bursting their budgets.

“I’m losing $300 this week,” said trucker Jim Mertens, en route to Chicago with a load of trade show booths from a toy industry show in New York. “We’re the ones caught in the middle.”

Mertens bought diesel fuel in Pennsylvania on Thursday for $1.69 a gallon, more than 30 cents above what he’d paid a couple weeks earlier. Truckers reported seeing prices jump even as they drove, particularly in the Northeast, which some long-haulers were avoiding to escape being gouged.

“Fuel crisis”--words that haven’t been paired much here since the Arab oil embargo days of the ‘70s--is on the blue lips of people who can’t come in from the cold because they already are in, and it’s cold there too. The snow that fell on the Northeast and Midwest on Friday couldn’t cover up the fact that diesel and gas prices were jumping up and down like the stock market, triggering charges of price gouging and profiteering.

Sleet and snow closed airports and schools across the Midwest and Northeast on Friday and dumped up to 9 inches in parts of Nebraska and Iowa. But some motorists were avoiding areas not because of slick roads, but high pump prices.

“This is winter,” said Todd Spencer, executive vice president of the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Assns. “Winter isn’t a national disaster. Consumers’ pocketbooks shouldn’t be hijacked just because it’s winter.”

Spencer noted that BP Amoco just reported record quarterly earnings, even as prices were going through the roof. “It seems to me that there is some profiteering going on,” he said. Calls to spokesmen at BP Amoco’s Chicago headquarters were not returned.

Earlier this week, oil prices shot up to $30 a barrel, the highest level in nine years. Fuel and heating oil prices quickly followed suit, although there were wild fluctuations not only between regions but also within sections of states served by the same suppliers. Prices were falling in the Northeast on Friday but rising in the mid-Atlantic states.

Politicians throughout the coldest sections of the country pressed President Clinton to release the government’s emergency oil reserves--he ordered the release of $125 million in remaining federal heating assistance money Wednesday--and to get tougher with OPEC, which indicated Thursday night that it might ease price controls.

Some of the high diesel costs were blamed on the fact that much of the oil used to make diesel was shifted toward fuel oil after advocates and lawmakers in cold-weather regions began warning of a winter disaster among low-income people.

“It’s not good for me, because I’m on a fixed income,” said Minnie Manning, an 88-year-old New Jersey woman who had heard her neighbors’ horror stories and was waiting for a huge heating bill.

At the Lehigh Valley American Red Cross office in northeastern Pennsylvania, which includes the cities of Allentown and Easton, callers were complaining about heating oil suppliers demanding higher monthly prices to be paid in advance. Even people who had contracts to pay a standard monthly rate of about $125 were being told to increase that payment, said Cordelia Miller, director of community services.

“We just had a lady who called who said she was down half a tank and wanted to fill it up. The vendor told her it would cost $200, which is twice what it was. Some people cannot adjust their budgets for this.”

Instead of releasing federal assistance money to help consumers, trucking interests would rather that the government create incentives for people to convert from oil to gas or electricity.

“How are those people on heating assistance going to get their groceries if we don’t have diesel?” Spencer asked.

In fact, some potato growers in Maine weren’t able to find any truckers willing to take the product to market. Maine growers often rely on independent truckers who come into the state with empty trailers after making deliveries elsewhere in the Northeast.

Some crops were reportedly lost as a result.

One of the more mysterious phenomena in the oil crisis has been the way the price spikes seem to materialize, create a regional uproar and then disappear--only to reappear elsewhere.

Russell Flanagan, who hauled a load of chimney cement from Pittsburgh to Baltimore on Friday, says Virginia has had lower diesel prices than Pennsylvania for the 38 years he’s been driving.

Yet when he stopped for fuel in Fredericksburg, Va., he was charged $1.50 a gallon, which an attendant says was 7 cents higher than the price the previous evening. Meanwhile, the price in Pennsylvania had edged lower during the same span.

“You had the majority of elected officials hollering up and down the Northeast, alleging price fixing and gouging,” Spencer said. “Did that have an effect on the market? It probably did.”

Having to suffer through a normal winter after three mild ones has pushed some people past the point of simple snowball fights.

In New Hampshire, a 27-year-old man who started his own oil business was being sought by hundreds of angry consumers who never got the heating fuel they paid for upfront. More than 1,600 customers in New Hampshire and Maine filed complaints with their states.

Eddie Crist, co-manager of a Race Track gas station in Fredericksburg, hears a steady diet of complaints from motorists. But he can’t tell them why the prices went up. “It just comes through on the computer from the home office,” he said. “I’m just a facilitator.”