No 'Apocalyptic' Gas Hike Seen

Hurricane Katrina's wave of misery is reaching across the country in the form of practically unheard of increases in gas prices.

And something not seen since the 1970s is starting to appear in some areas: gas lines.

A CBS News poll finds that Americans consider the cost of gas one of the most important problems facing our country.

"We're looking at a price shock. There's no question about that," says analyst Tom Kloza of the Oil Price Information Service. "But, I don't think we're looking at a '70s-style crisis.

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"That can lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy," he says, "where the distribution system would get strained, even with normal supplies, and we've been cut off from about 15 percent of our supply for the last week."

Kloza says that if you're paying over $4, you're probably being gouged.

"The reality is that a lot of stations will pay different prices," he says, "depending on if they have a pricing formula that's tied to the spot market, which moved up a dollar very, very quickly, or if they might have contracts with major refineries, where the price rises are more temperate."

Kloza says that if the market was unregulated, gas might hit $4 a gallon.

"My sense now is that prices are gonna go above $3," he says. "They're gonna trade between $3 and $3.50 at the retail pump. But we're not gonna see that Apocalyptic increase, or doubling or tripling, that we saw in the '70s."

During Labor Day weekend, he says, "You can probably find the cheapest gas in the Northeast, to some extent, and — the strangest of all things — on the West Coast.

"The worst spots aren't gonna be necessarily where the highest prices are. The hot spots are going to be from, let's say, Washington, D.C., down to Florida and along the Gulf Coast, and into the Midwest.

"That's where we lost a couple of the arteries that deliver the gasoline from the refineries that remained up after Katrina."