People flocked to a filling station to have their motorcycles refilled in District 12, Ho Chi Minh City on Sunday night after the municipal market surveillance agency said that several other stations were closed down over short supply.

Staff at filling station No. 17 on To Ky Street in District 12 had to deal with long queues of customers since the beginning of the day.

Many motorcyclists waited for up to 20 minutes while some others invented different reasons to urge the staff to prioritize them.

Several customers waited in vain until the venue shut down at 10:00 pm on the day.

Tran Tuong, a staff member at the station, said that the crowds had become common for three days since many other gas stations are either closed or not selling at night.

Although Tuong’s station ran out of the popular RON95-III gasoline and is only selling RON97-V fuel, the highest priced type, its sales increased sharply.

Earlier on the same day, the Ho Chi Minh City market surveillance agency said reviews showed that a total of 54 filling stations in Tan Binh District, District 12, and Binh Chanh District are temporarily short on gasoline supply, according to the Vietnam News Agency.

They had already placed orders for further supply, but faced either silence or unclear delivery time notice from suppliers.

On the other hand, the municipal market surveillance agency is working to track down stations that halt operations just to wait for fuel prices to increase.

Late on Sunday night, Nguyen Nguyen Phuong, deputy director of the Department of Industry and Trade of Ho Chi Minh City, told Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper that the shortage of fuel supply is only occurring locally owing to the interruption of imports and the impacts of recent storms and floods in the central region on transportation.

It only affects small businesses, according to Phuong, while petrol stations run by major firms are still in normal operation.

For solutions, Phuong said Petrolimex Saigon, the Ho Chi Minh City subsidiary of Vietnam’s top gasoline firm Petrolimex, would mobilize 80 tank trucks to increase supply to all of its retail stores on the same night as a way to compensate for the closure of nearby stores.

His department also proposed the municipal People’s Committee to allow local traffic police units and the transport department to prioritize tank trucks’ access to filling stations.

Besides, the deputy director affirmed that about 500 stations are still fully supplying petrol to the market, with his department publishing the list of these stores for residents’ information.

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