OK, this isn't funny any more. Where's the army?

[Orangejuicemarathoner]

One quarter of staff and students late to school this morning, and 10% didn't get there at all. It has been announced that, excepting physical disability, any student within 4 miles or adult within 6 miles will be expected to walk in, but Its expected to be worse tomorrow with a good chance we will be closed by Wednesday.

AA reporting over 100 "incidents" on the road within a 10 mile radius of the school - mostly roads blocked, and mostly by queues outside petrol stations.

I struggled to get home by bike, because of the chaos on the roads - I got off my bike and walked several miles of it.

I called in at a supermarket on the way home. The shelves were more than three quarters empty. No bread or milk. So I'm sitting here drinking black tea planning rice for dinner instead of cheese on toast.

I know its not a catastrophe that I spent an extra hour getting home, and dont have milk in my tea, but what is that saying about the state we are in?

AIBU to say the army should be called in. What have we got an army for? Surely, an organisation of thousands of fit, capable, organised individuals, with vehicles and capacity and skills in logistics is exactly what we need to be utilised in this situation right here right now.

PS, is it ok to feed dog food to cats? does anyone know?

How much of it is actual panic buying? I had enough fuel for today so didn’t join the queues over the weekend but I had no choice today. The estimated walking time for me to get to work is just short of 3 hours. Or 2 hours via public transport with 2 changes and a reduced service due to driver shortage. I can drive it in 25 minutes.

I have half a tank of diesel so don't plan to top up yet but I was out and about today and passed 11 garages of which none had any diesel. This morning they all had unleaded but this afternoon all but one were completely closed as out of fuel. Large northern city.

@Orangejuicemarathoner what do you mean by it wasn't running all day? School transport is at the beginning and end of the day.

Got my online shop tonight. The usual huge amount of choice when shopping, swift delivery, no substitutions.

@shauabs

What a massive overreaction. Our local petrol station was open today, no issues, very small queue. I had a full ASDA shop delivered on Saturday, one substitution for cereal 🙄 Threads like this just fuel the ridiculous behaviour.

Excellent. Very pleased for you. Meanwhile every fuel station near me has problems. Several are closed. I live very rurally and we don’t have lots of garages that we can choose from. My closest shop, ironically on a garage forecourt, is 4 miles away and it does milk and sweets and biscuits and magazines and not much else. For anything else I’d have to walk more like 8 miles. And back. I’m looking at my fuel gauge and the food in my cupboards and wondering how the fuck I am seriously in a situation where I have a slight but genuine niggling worry about accessing food. We’ve had food shortages for a while. Odd and sometimes random things but definite gaps on the shelves. I can do the next few days without too much of a problem but I honestly thought this would be over by today and it isn’t.

I’m not scaremongering- I’m concerned. It’s not happening to you but that doesn’t mean that for those of us who are seeing it happening around them are scaremongering. We’re saying what we see.

Asda in our town is limiting to £30 so likely a company policy as others have mentioned Asda doing this, small queues where I am and not all garages have all fuels, DH cycled round the garages today to check where had diesel. East Midlands town.

@lannistunut

Welcome to Brexit Britain, nothing quite works anymore.

Expect the people who voted for it are moaning loudest too.

They can't get the army in to do this in Scotland as they are already helping with ambulances aren't they? Everything is breaking.

Erm what? All the complaining has been done by people bring up Brexit.

[quote Stormsy]@Orangejuicemarathoner what do you mean by it wasn't running all day? School transport is at the beginning and end of the day.[/quote]
It wasn't all running today.

Some school transport was running

Some school transport was not running

@PegorySpeck

Why do people lead such chaotic and disorganised lives though? I mean why wait until your car is running on fumes before you decide you need petrol, or why wait until you’re on your last drop of milk or slice of bread before you get some more? I honestly could not live like this, it’s so dysfunctional , it’s just asking for drama.

Come on - you can't conceive of people being in situations where they don't have spare cash to top up? Where they might be waiting for weekly pay to put fuel in their car, or waiting for their UC to go in to do a food shop, and hadn't anticipated this situation?

Let's say someone lives solely on UC or a low wage and is scraping by, but there's zero 'spare' cash at all. She puts enough petrol in the car for getting to/from work for the fortnight. Then getting home one day takes twice as long because of a crash or a diversion or bad traffic, and the next day she has to go to a different, further away, supermarket for essentials because the one near her hasn't got something in (the ones near me look like the set of zombie films, v weird), or a family friend is taken ill and she goes to help, or her child needs taking to a hospital appointment further away. Then all of a sudden, on payday, when normally she'd be down to a smidge left in her car but unforeseen circumstances mean she's on fumes, it gets to the morning when she's going to the petrol station and she can actually afford to put her fortnight's fuel in, only there isn't any left. And she can't drive somewhere further away to get it. And then she walks to the supermarket and there's no bread or milk, and now she's got no car to get to the further one either, and she never has 'spare' money to stock up on cupboard staples, so there just isn't any food.

Sure, there are people who love to gamble with their petrol tank. But there are also people who have had no option and people in that ^^ kind of scenario aren't that rare.

For the first two years of me having a car (which I had to to get to work), I let my car get as low as was possible because I could just about get to work and back on one tank in a week, and I got paid on a Friday so I could add more in. One unexpected bad traffic day or emergency that week would have meant I'd have to borrow some money to get to work on the Thursday. And - lucky me - I had people I could borrow money off.

Lots of people are one disaster, minor or otherwise, from being fucked.

Our local forums are full of people furious at the lack of petrol, having spent literally hours driving around in order to top up, all the while whilst cursing out those selfish panic buyers. One person stayed exactly where they had driven and they had covered over 50 miles. And then we're slating people for the fact that they had none to drive their kids to school tomorrow.

@Bluntness100

We don’t need the army, we just need the absolute twats panicking to stop.

Absolutely

I despair of the British public.

I hear you, OP. I've not got enough fuel to drive to work tomorrow. Just went round 7 fuel stations and have five given up. Got enough to get me to the local train station tomorrow but that's it.

Petrol stations near me (south Manchester) are mostly out of diesel, most had petrol this morning but when I went past the one nearest me earlier it had run out.

Supermarkets are hit and miss - Tesco and Sainsburys look like ghost towns, the cheapy shops (B&M and Home Bargains) have plenty of tinned/dry stuff in though. Our cats are furious because their food is out of stock everywhere!

*have now given up

I didn't know that cats couldn't eat other food, damn cat up the road comes to our garden and feasts on the hedgehogs pellets, don't seem to have done it any harm as it comes every night troughing away - poor hedgehogs hardly get a look in

Really? London? Who probably have the best public transport in the country? Scary.

I work in a school in a London Borough (outer edge), if I run out of fuel I can get three buses which with no traffic takes about 2 hours; or I can use the wonderful train service - to get to my school I need to get a train INTO London, then a train OUT OF London and walk the mile and a half from the station to my school (or get the bus IF it isn’t caught in gridlocked traffic). Some parts of London have sh*t transport links.

No petrol to be had in most parts of London. Over the weekend there were huge queues everywhere and roads blocked.

My local Sainsburys has lots of bare shelves and the staff were filling up the fridges with booze to hide the fact they are short on supplies. The run up to Christmas will be interesting if things don’t improve.

On the news they said it was worse in urban areas

@dementedma

Where’s the army? Busy with helping our UK and devolved powers with Covid tests, vaccinations, driving ambulance and oh, defending the country! Some are just back from sorting out the mess in Afghanistan.

The army that has been decimated by Defence cuts year on year and which is technically no longer an Army as the the numbers are too low to meet that criteria?

The soldiers who are routinely slagged off on MN as “hired killers” are now suddenly to save the day. Again?

They are supposed to provide MACA (Military Aid to Civilian Authorities) as a last resort, not every time the politicians fuck up.

And final point, wtf do you think their trucks and vehicles run on????

This all day, everyday. Mumsnet recently told me that they didn’t know how I could live with myself being married to a ‘killer.’ The tables have turned now OP’s had to drink black tea.

We don’t need the army, we just need all the idiots to stop panic buying.

@Echobelly

It sounds as though things have been a bit calmer in open stations today. We don't need the car much so I'm going to wait until we need as I don't want to add any pressure.

Not sure army's going to make much difference - honestly, if people who don't actually really need their car that much just calm the hell down and realise they don't need all the petrol in the world right this minute it'll be sorted long before any other intervention could make a difference.

If today was calmer, I'm glad I didn't drive through East Grinstead over the weekend.

It took me 15 minutes to get through the one way system this morning, and 30 minutes to travel approx a quarter of a mile this evening. The queue for a petrol station had gridlocked the one-way system and southbound traffic couldn't join it.

I didn't see any petrol stations without fuel, although a lot of them had several pumps coned off. But my SIL in Tunbridge Wells hasn't been able to get any fuel at all. Luckily, she doesn't work and her DH's van and DD's car both have full tanks, so they're managing ok.

I really feel for people who have long commutes that they can only do by car, it must be pretty stressful.

I don't think shortages of things in general is as simple as a 'scare story' not necessarily as scary as it sounds.

I didn't notice anything around here (North London) until a fortnight ago, and it's oddly specific things - balm tissues, Tesco own-brand Shreddies, single juice cartons -bits and pieces like that I haven't seen in stock for the last few weeks. Some things are definitely running low.

But, neither does 'food shortage' mean everyone will fighting over a single roast rat this time next week. What it means, in a world where we have got used to immense choice, is we may have to get used to not finding everything we want every time we go to the supermarket. And sometimes that could be staples like bread. There will be food, but less choice. My mum is broadly unsympathetic as she grew up in a Communist country were food really was short and you never knew quite what you might be able to get from one week to thr next.

Though this is not to be nonchalant about the impact it will have on a lot of people, as obviously prices will go up and this will be serious for a lot of households. As we're one that can cope I'm aiming to buy an extra bag for the food bank each week.

@PegorySpeck

Why do people lead such chaotic and disorganised lives though? I mean why wait until your car is running on fumes before you decide you need petrol, or why wait until you’re on your last drop of milk or slice of bread before you get some more? I honestly could not live like this, it’s so dysfunctional , it’s just asking for drama.

Why do some people not have the brain power to work out that if on Friday you have say a half full tank but are unable due to queues and closed garages to get any more by the end of Monday you might just be running on empty.

Or maybe they can't afford to buy any until today

Are you actually that stupid?

@Echobelly
‘But, neither does 'food shortage' mean everyone will fighting over a single roast rat this time next week. What it means, in a world where we have got used to immense choice, is we may have to get used to not finding everything we want every time we go to the supermarket.’

This really made me laugh, and reminded me to watch Shrek this weekend, thank you!

Firstly, Op Escalin isn't just the "army". Secondly, there is no shortage of fuel or drivers, Op Escalin is there to stop fuel drivers from striking again, not to satisfy the idiotic impulses of the manipulated masses. It'll calm down in a couple days when people's tanks are full and they realise there is still fuel being delivered to the forecourt.