But if something caused the gasoline to stop flowing for a longer period of time, not being able to fill up our vehicles would be among the least of our problems. Trucks need gasoline too, and if our trucks stopped running for an extended period it would virtually paralyze every part of our society.
Most Americans don’t realize this, but we are completely and utterly dependent on our truckers. Without them, our way of life would quickly cease to exist. We hardly ever hear anyone give recognition to the hard-working truck drivers that are cruising up and down our highways day after day, but the truth is that they are absolutely critical to our success as a nation.
Prior to this month, most Americans couldn’t have even imagined a scenario in which all of our trucks suddenly stopped running, but the cyberattack against the Colonial Pipeline has exposed how deeply vulnerable our most sensitive infrastructure really is. According to the American Petroleum Institute, there are more than 190,000 miles of pipelines that carry liquid petroleum in the United States…
More than 190,000 miles of liquid petroleum pipelines traverse the United States. They connect producing areas to refineries and chemical plants while delivering the products American consumers and businesses need. Pipelines are safe, efficient and, because most are buried, largely unseen.
They move crude oil from oil fields on land and offshore to refineries where it is turned into fuels and other products, then from the refineries to terminals where fuels are trucked to retail outlets. Pipelines operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Normally, we don’t think about these exceedingly important pipelines, but now we have seen what can happen when a single one of them is shut down for a few days. The Colonial Pipeline is one of the most important pipelines in the entire country. According to the New York Times, it “can carry roughly three million barrels of fuel a day”… READ MORE