From staff reports

The pace of power restoration slowed in Vicksburg Thursday as lines for gasoline grew longer through the night and into today.

Vicksburg has seven main circuits, all backup, said Don Arnold, district manager for Entergy, which sells electricity to most of Warren and Claiborne counties. Even though more crews are working, the pace slows because smaller areas are being switched on.

In numbers, 1,000 more meters were reconnected by today, leaving 11,000 out in the two counties. At the peak of the outage, 22,000 customers lost power.

As gas lines grew, so did tensions. The 911 Dispatch Center reported 33 fight calls, many of them to gas stations. Supplies remained erratic and indefinite, sometimes with hordes of motorists exiting one station when supplies became depleted and shifting to another. Tankers were being guarded; some had escorts.

Officials began consolidating shelter operations to the Vicksburg Convention Center Thursday at 5 p.m., said Christi Kilroy, special projects coordinator at City Hall. She said the central shelter will continue to be run by the Red Cross.

Up to 1,100 people were housed here and that number was down by half Thursday. There was a constant flow of people leaving to try to return to their homes and others arriving from devastated areas.

Those in the oil business here believe the immediate fuel crisis will pass.

“There’s going to be gas, it’s just going to be slow, it’s going to be steady and it’s going to be expensive,” said Mike Burnett of Ergon Inc., a Jackson-based company with a refinery and other operations here.

Benno Van Ryswyk, a manager for Hill City Oil Company, said, “The major oil companies are having the decency not to raise their oil prices.” That doesn’t apply to independents. While posted prices at most Vicksburg outlets remained level through Thursday, some price hikes were reported this morning.

Dan Waring, co-owner of Vicksburg-based Waring Oil, a regional distributor and retailer, said this morning he had gone to the coast to try to secure supply for customers here. “Everybody’s in trouble,” Waring said. Refinery shutdowns are part of the reason. “You can’t get anything out if you don’t pump anything in,” Waring said.

In addition to the fight calls, authorities reported 92 disturbance calls, 25 burglary reports and 32 traffic incidents in the past 24 hours. “It just gets wild out there,” Police Capt. Mark Culbertson said of flaring tensions.

Burnett explained that two major pipelines are key pieces of the supply chain for gasoline for about 90 percent of the southeastern United States. One of those pipelines has its main control center in Collins, south of Jackson, and the other in south Louisiana.

Those pipelines need electric power to their control stations and, as power is restored, the flow of refined fuels should begin to increase, he said. The Collins station was at about 50 percent of capacity Thursday, doubling the previous day’s flow and doing better hour by hour. “It’s expected to come back up rapidly over the next two to three days,” he said.

Progress was also being made in restoring power to coastal refineries, but restarting such facilities also takes some time, Burnett said. “You don’t just switch a button,” he said. “It can take a few hours to a couple of days.”

Waring said people should refrain from nonessential driving and hording fuel until the emergency passes. “Hunker down and let the people who need to go home get gas,” he said.

Also, a plan is in place to fuel emergency vehicles separately. A station on North Washington at Haining Road is exclusively for that purpose, said Geoffrey Greetham, 911 Dispatch Center director.

Vicksburg Mayor Laurence Leyens said he has decided to park the non-essential city vehicles for the rest of the week and has asked residents to conserve fuel just as a precautionary measure. Vicksburg’s population is swollen by thousands of refugees, staying in shelters, motels and with friends or relatives.