Comment by al_borland

> How does one plan ahead for a multi-day regional power failure, that may only happen once in their lifetime?

Ready.gov has instructions.

> Should everyone have several hundred gallons of gasoline stored in their garage just incase?

oh, c'mon.

Do you or any one person you know use several hundred gallons of gas over the course of a few days on critical things? If that is the case, then yes, by all means you should have a private gasoline backup supply since you are running some sort of industrial scale operation.

If you are worried about it, just make sure you have a several day supply of gasoline on hand. For most people that use about a tank of gas per week that means filling up when you are at half tank. For those of us, like me, who live in a place where a generator is occasionally useful, a couple of jerry cans full of gas are typically already on hand. Hundreds of gallons could keep me powered up for weeks at a minimum unless I was really trying to use a lot of power.

For most people, gasoline is used exclusively for their car, which has a multi-day gas supply storage mechanism built in.

Lets say we require all gas stations to have the ability to pump gas during a blackout. Then what? It doesn't solve any of your hypotheticals. Without a beefy generator and a professional crossover switch, you aren't powering your home with gasoline. What is a working gas station going to do for a renter, or apartment dweller?

In any case. If things get actually desperate, it isn't that hard for a handy person to wire a generator up on the spot, and get gas pumping, although at that point, what are the chances that the payment network is online. At that point you can just run the pump by hand if it's truly desperate.

> Suggesting individuals prepare for this seems equally absurd, does it not?

Not absurd at all. Experts and the government actually suggest that people do some of their own preparations for disasters. They suggest that you have enough on hand to survive for 48 hours without outside help. There are entire government initiatives, campaigns and organizations based on this exact premise. Check out Ready.gov for the USA federal version. You can probably find state and local level initiatives where you are too, if in the US. Almost every large, multi-day, regional blackout in living memory is weather related, which also means it is predictable.

Maybe they would just design a more reliable grid, or have an emergency management organization that can flexibly solve many problems instead of dictating huge costs to private business owners in order to cover for extremely rare events.

Pretty well known, and documented. You can google it, or do the math yourself. Typical margins are around 1-2% on fuel sales. You can check this by looking up the wholesale price of gas (search for 'gasoline rack price', that tells you what it costs at the distribution center), then add in taxes, and you will find that most stations are within a few cents of cost. Don't forget that gas pumps cost $20k per, and all of the fixed costs like tanks, testing, calibration, inspections, etc.

The business model for a typical gas station is to bring people in with competitively priced gas, since people are incredibly price sensitive to gas, and then make money with high margin c-store items. Most of the things in a c-store have triple digit margins. That's why you'll see plenty of c-stores without gas stations, but its pretty rare to see a gas station that doesn't have a business attached.

Movie theaters have a similar model. The movie gets you in the door, but it’s very low margin. They make almost all their profit on the concessions.

While I can count on one hand the number of times I walk into the store at a gas station in a given year, I know others who buy things on a daily basis, to the point that they’re on a first name basis with everyone there and the employees start asking questions if a few days go buy without a visit.

I don't live in SoCal. I live in rural Canada where I get several power outages per year due to inclement weather downing lines.

It sounds like there wasn't really a problem with gas availability, in your case. You were able to get enough gas to comfortably power a generator with no preparation during one of the biggest emergencies the city has ever seen. During the LA fires, the power cuts were to small enough areas that you could have just driven to a different area of the city. That sounds inconvenient, but hardly worth the effort of building independent power generation sources for the 10k+ gas stations in your state.

A far better solution is to do what we do in my part of Canada: a competently run power company that doesn't arbitrarily shut off power due to failing infrastructure setting billions of dollars worth of city on fire. We don't have PSPS's despite living in a very fire prone place with extreme weather because our infrastructure is maintained much better.

Instead of forcing everyone to subsidize individual power plants for gas stations to do long tail risk mitigation, California should maybe invest in a grid that doesn't regularly cause billion dollar fires.