Motorists on Saturday waited for ninety minutes to fill up their gas tank at the Costco at I-10 and UTSA on the northwest side, waiting in lines that backed up fifteen cars deep onto the access road, News Radio 1200 WOAI reports.
Across the street at the normally busy Valero station, there was no gas to be sold, plastic bags over the pump handles.
San Antonio drivers went through a third day of the largely self-induced gas panic, what has been called a 'run on the tank,' blamed in part on Gulf Coast refinery and pipeline outages due to Hurricane Harvey.
Gas station managers told 1200 WOAI similar stories: they would get their normal shipment of gas, and instantly, driven by social media, drivers would descend on the station, and the pump, which normally serve customers for several days after being replenished, would run dry after a few hours.
Mayor Nirenberg, who on Friday urged station managers to 'voluntarily and temporarily' limit the amount of gas that can be sold to individual customers, again pleaded for San Antonians to stop the panic buying.
"People are experiencing a gas shortage, because others are loading up on more than necessary," he said in a Facebook post.
Nirenberg said gas purchases on Saturday were 'two and a half times' their normal level for a Saturday.
Experts tell 1200 WOAI news the crisis should begin to wane on Sunday for three reasons.
First, the refineries and pipelines in the path of Harvey, especially those in the Corpus Christi area which serve San Antonio, are returning to normal. Exxon Mobil early Sunday restarted its huge Baytown refinery, which will pump millions of gallons of gasoline a day into the local market.
People who stood in line for 90 minutes on Saturday to buy gasoline now have it, and in most cases will not need to fill up again. And, the Labor Day weekend, which helped fuel the crisis due to people with travel plans desperately needing to fill up, is now to the point where those people have gotten to their destinations.
But none of this will bring prices down. San Antonians are paying thirty to forty cents more a gallon today than we were paying before Harvey hit, and those prices will remain elevated for some time.