PRESS RELEASE HURRICANE DORIAN
BROOKNEAL, Va., December 22 2017 – Wholesale fuel distributer and emergency fuel management company Foster Fuels, Inc. has spent over one hundred successive days responding to three record-breaking hurricanes during the 2017 hurricane season. Working alongside agencies such as the Department of Defense (DoD), the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA), and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Foster Fuels’ Mission Critical division provided logistics and fuel distribution to critical infrastructures across the devastated areas of Texas, Florida, and Puerto Rico.
Providing diesel fuel, gasoline, and propane to fuel the relief efforts of the United States government, Foster Fuels supplied thousands of gallons of fuel a day to enable key facilities to stay operational, like hospitals, water treatment plants, kidney dialysis centers, communications towers, first responder operations centers, the National Guard, and military vehicles.
“This mission has been possible with the Foster Fuels team getting to the right place at the right time with the fuel that is needed,” said U.S. Army Josielyn Carrasquillo LTC in a recent interview. “We are getting to those affected areas, to those hospitals, to those communication towers — building back Puerto Rico to come back to what we were before.”
After initial activation on August 25, 2017, Foster Fuels spent over a month aiding the relief efforts for Hurricane Harvey and Hurricane Irma across the South East. Then, on October 2, over 130 of Foster Fuels’ and allied organizations’ employees left out of Lynchburg Regional Airport and headed to San Juan, Puerto Rico after category 5 Hurricane Maria left the island and surrounding areas devastated. Arriving later that day was a barge carrying over 120 fuel trucks that had left on September 26 from Jacksonville, Florida. After nearly three months overseas, a majority of the crew returned home on December 15, making their mission an almost four-month-long process.
Senior Vice President of Foster Fuels Stephen Tibbs said, “I am happy to report that the majority of our team will be home for the holidays. Operations have gone very well, and Foster Fuels has succeeded in every aspect of our mission. This is not a complete end to our mission,” he added, “but it is a significant milestone. There are many challenges that we are still working on that require a lot of focus.”
Foster Fuels is no stranger to the challenges of delivering emergency fuel in difficult times. Other notable activations include Superstorm Sandy in 2012, which caused over 75 billion dollars of damage, the magnitude seven earthquake in Haiti in 2010, and most recently category five Hurricane Matthew in 2016.
Although the Foster Fuels Mission Critical team has been able to provide the needed fuel to the area to keep the relief efforts on the island running in the first moments of need on the island, Puerto Rico has a long road ahead to build the island back. Foster Fuels urges those around the local area and nationally to support Puerto Rico and their relief efforts as they rebuild and regain what was lost.
About Foster Fuels
Foster Fuels is a 96-year-old, privately held corporation, providing distribution of diesel, gasoline, and propane to residential, commercial, and government customers through their Mission Critical Division. Foster Fuels operates a multi-award-winning national and international emergency fuel division, Mission Critical, specializing in business continuity and disaster recovery solutions for day-to-day needs and prevention.
