It is 7°C outside now (for those of you in Yankee land, that is about 44° F). The winds are brisk and steady at about 40 kph (25 mph) and the sun is bright. As I look outside my window where the local football team (soccer to Yankees) practices, I see a clump of men whose primary object seems to be to stay warm. From their dress, one would guess that the temperature must be near freezing and that there is a snowstorm impending. They are wearing heavy ski jackets, gloves, knitted ski caps, and scarfs. In this, they are not atypical. The average Uruguayo is as comfortable in the cold as a penguin is in the Sahara. If you have ever been in Florida in the winter, and see how Floridians react to the cold, you will understand Uruguayos pretty well. My sister-in-law starts wearing a coat at 70°F (21°C) and considers anything below about 60°F (about 15°C) to be “freezing”.
At this point you may be thinking: Thank you Southron for the weather report, but what the heck does this have to do with Supergas?
Because of the mild temperatures nine months of the year many houses (and even apartments) here do not have any heating system beyond a fireplace or two. During the cold months they rely on very efficient space heaters fueled by Supergas, more commonly known as propane gas, bottled gas, or simply LPG.
The sole importer of Supergas is ANCAP, the state-owned company that provides oil, gasoline, propane, and (believe it or not) cement. To the best of my knowledge, ANCAP does not distribute Supergas directly to the public. That task is handled by a goodly number of distribution companies.
In normal times, this system works very well. Each of the distribution companies have rolling fleets of trucks which deliver the gas in 13 kg (28 lbs) tanks, usually within 30 minutes after you call in your order. But, because of the extreme fog over the last few weeks, several shiploads of Supergas were delayed, and a shortage developed here in Montevideo. To my knowledge very few people actually ran out of gas, but in many cases, our own included, we ended up using our entire backup store of gas before we could get any refills.
The response of the “powers-that-be” at ANCAP was amusing. It was a perfect example of a bureaucracy making matters worse.
In order to reduce the amount of Supergas consumed, ANCAP allowed the distributors to reduce the amount of gas per tank from the standard 13 kg to 8 kg. Of course, some scalawags took advantage of this situation and started putting only 4 kg of gas in each tank. But ANCAP moved with alacrity to counter such gouging, and ordered that tanks that were sold with only 8 kg of Supergas would be required to have a black sticker over the nozzle instead of the usual red one. (This is almost as good as the childproof bottles in the US that only children can open.)
I guess the idea was to more evenly distribute the amount of gas that was available, but what ANCAP neglected to factor in was that tanks with less gas would need to be replaced more often, thus burning more gasoline or diesel in the delivery trucks… then again, since ANCAP is the primary supplier for gasoline and diesel fuel, perhaps they did factor it in. ¿Quien sabe?
The good news is that the fog has lifted, the weather is back to normal, and Supergas is super again!
Interesting take David. I was sitting by the TV a couple of weeks ago when this kerfuffle started, and I thought I heard it was because Ancap had closed a facility for repairs, one that was involved in processing the gas. The people at the table were laughing, saying only Ancap would do something like that just before the season starts…..
Maybe the fog was on top of that, or the reporter was wrong.
Left by Fish on June 24th, 2007
Ok.You are right with the problem of supergas.But you must say also that it lasted for about a week . The problem with the refinery was that it has get poor maintenance in previous years and when they began the reparations last september ,they found that things were worse than expected.Yes,after that, part of the fault was of the bureaucracy for the delay obtaining the spares.
>>You are absolutely right Luiz–the limited supply only lasted a short time. However, there still appears to be ashortage of garafas (propane tanks) here in Montevideo–to get extras we had to go all the way to Pan de Azucar.
Left by Luis on August 8th, 2007