Fuel supply heading in the right direction for Derbyshire
Derbyshire Community Transport is relieved that their service users have been unaffected
The craze for petrol is seemingly settling in Derbyshire as petrol services re-open. Although a number still have steady queues.
While a number of services have been affected in the area, things are looking up now as residents resist the urge to over fuel their tanks, and stick to only buying what they need.
Manager at Derbyshire Community Transport Elizabeth Esnouf was initially concerned that the fuel shortage might affect people travelling with their services if they could not fuel their vehicles adequately. As most of their service users cannot or choose not to drive, this could have had a large impact on their lives.
"As soon as we heard about what could be happening, we started by keeping a close eye on the fuel that we had in our vehicles and we've just kept them topped up."
But things are looking up now, and Elizabeth is confident that people who use their services have not been held back. She said:
"We're watching very closely but it's not affected our services, and we're able to reassure people and say yep, we're still working."
"We're also keeping in touch with our driver assistants, because there's no point having a bus if you've got no one to drive it!"
Adapting to the issue
Elizabeth also noted that they have found more ways of working around challenges like the most recent fuel crisis since the announcement of the first lockdown, and they have been looking ahead at what they would do if things took a turn for the worse. She added:
"We have a contingency plan in place as to how we would prioritise things and what we would do if we did run low on fuel. We'd probably go back to what we did in lockdown and do things like shopping for people but we're not in that place at the moment."
"What we did in lockdown was, we kept in contact with people that use our services. It's keeping people part of the overall family, and we wanted to make sure there was no one really suffering or had a problem as a result of what was happening. That's what we did then, and that's what we would do now."