IMPACT: The Fuel Crisis Begins to Hurt

The energy pinch so far has been an abstract thing for most Americans, more future threat than present trouble. Last week, for a growing number, the crisis brought real pain. Shortage-caused layoffs spread into the auto, electronics, rubber and aluminum industries. Traveling was rapidly becoming a nightmare because of gasless Sundays, airline flight cancellations and, most spectacularly, a series of highway blockades in the East, Midwest and South staged by owner-drivers of heavy trailer trucks.

The truckers, squeezed between rising diesel-fuel costs and lower speed limits that cut the number of miles they can cover in a day, are the first large group of Americans to have their incomes directly reduced by the fuel crisis (see box page 33). Their protests seemed spontaneous; both the Teamsters Union and the American Trucking Association publicly disavowed them. But the drivers have their own informal communications network: the Citizen's Band radios that link them rig-to-rig as they roll along. Last week those radios crackled with calls to revolt by parking tractor-trailers across turnpikes and barricading traffic. After the first major jam was organized Monday by a driver (known to other truckers as River Rat) on a stretch of Interstate 80 near Blakeslee, Pa., the stoppages spread into Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Indiana, New Jersey, New York and Ohio. One of the worst blockades, staged by 350 trucks, backed up traffic as much as twelve miles on roads leading to the Delaware Memorial Bridge in the Philadelphia-Wilmington area.

The longest tie-up, on the Ohio Turnpike, strangled traffic between Cleveland and Toledo for nearly 24 hours beginning Wednesday morning.

By midweek, the Governors of Delaware, New Jersey, Ohio and Pennsylvania had ordered state police and National Guard units to drag stopped trucks off the road and arrest any drivers who tried to interfere. That tactic broke the traffic jams, but the truckers are determined to continue their protests until the Nixon Administration gets fuel prices reduced, raises speed limits or both. Some are trying to organize a nationwide strike for Thursday and Friday this week.

Non-professional drivers are already getting a taste of gas-pump privation. On the first gasless Sunday, an estimated 90% of the nation's filling-station operators obeyed President Nixon's call to shut down between 9 p.m. Saturday and midnight Sunday. Whether the closings actually saved much—or any—fuel is questionable. Some stations did double their normal business on Saturday, then ran dry in the early-Monday rush. "It's just like the run on nylons in World War II," said a Boston attendant. Highways were nearly emptied in some areas; toll takers on Chicago expressways had unaccustomed leisure to lean out of their booths and chat between collections. But around such cities as San Francisco and Miami, roads seemed as crowded as ever.