LONG lines were formed at service stations yesterday as motorists jostled for petrol in the face of a shortage of some grades of gasolene and diesel, but industry officials said that the market should be back to normal by tomorrow.

“It should be regularised by Wednesday of this week,” said L G Brown, the former president of the Jamaica Gasolene Retailers Association (JGRA), who operates a large Esso station in the capital.

Brown, speaking on behalf of the JGRA, said that yesterday’s problem was exacerbated by “panic buying” by motorists.

“It is chaos,” said Colin Chambers, who was filling a container with diesel at the Unipet service station on Lyndhurst Road in Kingston. “Most stations do not have diesel.”

Chambers feared a continued shortage, and so did Rohan Wright, who was filling up his van at the same service station.

“I have been coming from as far as St Mary. There is no diesel in St Mary,” said Wright.

The tightness in the petroleum market started to develop at the weekend. Industry officials blamed it on a delay in the arrival of a shipment of finished products from Trinidad and Tobago because of a strike last week in that country’s petroleum industry.

That shipment arrived over the weekend and was being off-loaded yesterday.

“There will be no more shortfall as it (the confluence of circumstances) was just a very unusual situation,” said Dr Raymond Wright, the managing director of the Petroleum Corporation of Jamaica, the state-owned company that owns the Petrojam oil refinery.

Normally with 35,000 barrels-a-day, the Petrojam refinery supplies about 70 per cent of the refined petroleum used in Jamaica. But the island had to hustle to Trinidad and

Tobago and Venezuela for finished products after an October 28 fire at one of Petrojam’s refining towers forced a closure of the refinery.

It will remain out of commission for at least four-and-a-half months, officials say.

The government has been shopping around a US$160 million project to upgrade the refinery and Wright used the current problems in the market to highlight the logic of the idea, rather than Jamaica relying only on the importation of finished products.

“The shortfall underscores the importance of having a refinery,” he said.

In the immediate aftermath of the Petrojam fire, officials had promised there would be no shortage of supplies, saying that there were sufficient stockpiles for 10 days, which would act as a buffer until shipments arrived from Port of Spain and Caracas.

Most people, therefore, did not foresee the shortfall and the problem would have been worsened by the fact of yesterday’s crush when petrol stations were expected to be provided with supplies after the weekend.

“Most service stations were without diesel and some without 90 octane,” said the JGRA’s Brown.

Winston Ormsby, the operations manager at Shell, one of the major marketing companies operating in Jamaica, said most of its service stations would be back to normal supplies by tomorrow.

Shell, he said, was putting in contingencies to prevent a repeat of the problem, including decreasing its dependence on Petrojam by increasing its direct importation of refined products.

“I do not see this [shortage] happening again, but we are now undertaking our own contingency plans,” Ormsby told the Observer. “We are putting in place more frequent deliveries but it is not an easy thing to do.”

Across Kingston and elsewhere in the island, service stations reported that they had little or no petrol, and some said that while the shortage became manifest at the weekend the problem was building during last week.

Trevor Blake, proprietor of Blake’s Texaco, for instance, told the Observer that his service station received its last load last Tuesday.

“On Tuesday we were told that there was a problem with ’87’ and on Friday there was no ’90’ and no diesel,” he said.

Marcia Beckford at the Shell station at 146 Spanish Town Road said: “We have ’87’ and ’90’, but no diesel.it finished after 11:00 am. There was traffic …[entering] the station. The lines were like that from Saturday.”

“Supplies are running low, but we still have supplies,” said Nicholas Bryan, gasolene attendant at Epping Oil Company in Manchioneal, Portland.

In St Ann, St Mary and St James pumps also ran or were running dry and service stations operators hoped that the suppliers would keep their word by providing shipments today.