Letter Re: The Eastern Canada Gasoline Crisis

Hi James,
It’s interesting to look at what’s going on here in Ontario. The gasoline [filling] station near my office has been out of gas for two days, and others have been out for varying amounts of time. A friend of mine delivers fuel to gas stations, and was telling me what is happening:
1) There is a rail strike at CN Rail. This has prevented refineries from receiving shipments of the additives needed for diesel and gasoline.
2) There was a fire at one of the Ontario refineries, cutting production significantly. This fire occurred on February 15, and by two weeks later we are in shortages.
The Ontario Premier has asked the fuel suppliers to make sure that no towns run completely dry, and the suppliers are saying that we should be back to normal within two weeks.
Ontario has a reasonable supply of crude oil, with southern Ontario having a large number of wells. However, this situation highlights how fragile our fuel infrastructure it. One fire in one unit at one foundry, and a disturbance in the rail system has driven Ontario to a fuel crisis in a matter of two weeks. In light of this, I’m starting to realize that generators won’t do us much good when TSHTF, since we’ll be pretty much out of fuel not long after that. Even those people that have large reserves of safely stored fuel will run out eventually, and they’ll have to defend it against those people that
consider “hoarding of fuel” to be a crime. How about kerosene for oil lamps or propane for cooking? This stuff is not going to last in a long term situation.
I guess that in a long term survival situation we’ll simply revert to the natural way of doing things, getting up when it’s light, and sleeping when it’s not. We’ll walk, or bike when we need to go somewhere, and cook over wood fires, just like the rest of the Third World.
In the Revelation [of John] one of the angels is given the command “Don’t harm the wine or the oil.” These will be extremely precious commodities in times to come. Be blessed! – Chris