Florida is racing to refill its drained gas stations to allow millions of residents to return to their homes following mass evacuations caused by Hurricane Irma.
Historic demand for gasoline sparked major gas shortages in the days before Hurricane Irma struck Florida over the weekend.
At least 60% of the gas stations in Miami-Fort Lauderdale and Gainesville are without fuel, according to estimates on Monday morning from crowdsourcing platform GasBuddy. Roughly half of the gas stations in Jacksonville, Tampa, West Palm Beach and Fort Myers are also empty after Floridians took to their cars to flee the path of the storm.
These widespread gasoline outages threaten to make life even more difficult for Florida residents as they try to return home to see if their property suffered damage from Irma's powerful winds and storm surge.
The big key to fixing the gas shortages will be getting Florida's ports reopened to receive fuel shipments. Florida has few refineries of its own, making it reliant on tankers and barges to meet virtually all of its huge appetite for fuel.
Hurricane Irma forced the closure of most major Florida ports as of Friday evening. The ports are unlikely to reopen until Tuesday at the earliest, according to Goldman Sachs. That suggests just a "gradual" restocking of Florida's gasoline supplies, the investment bank wrote in a research report on Monday.
"Without the ports, there's no fuel flowing. It's likely the number of gas outages will rise before they start falling," said Patrick DeHaan, senior petroleum analyst at GasBuddy.