As the Chemical, Energy, Paper, Printing, Wood, and Allied Workers Union strike continues, South Africans are turning to the social networks to find fuel in their area.
Petrol panic has been hitting Gauteng particularly hard, with motorists scrambling to fill up their tanks as petrol stations begin to run dry before the weekend.
Motorists have been using the hashtag #gotpetrol in order to tweet information about which petrol stations do and don't have fuel.
The hashtag was initiated by @ Oh_Ar_Tambo_Air (http://twitter.com/#!/Oh_R_Thambo_Air) and rapidly snowballed through collaboration with @ Pigspotter (http://twitter.com/#!/PigSpotter) (the mystery man who motorists love and traffic cops hate) and other prolific tweeters.
The hashtag was the number one trending topic in Johannesburg, and third in SA yesterday. A site, www.gotpetrol.co.za, has also been established to aggregate #gotpetrol tweets.
Pigspotter tweeted yesterday: “In a weird sadistic kinda way, kinda proud we got our #gotpetrol to top three trending in South Africa! It is #1 in JHB.”
Oh_Ar_Tambo also tweeted: “@ PigSpotter Thanx 4 the collaboration, looking forward to trending with you again. Who says average joe's can't change the world?”
Journalist Alastair Otter (@ alastairotter) is also using information from motorists to compile a crowd-sourced map to indicate fuel availability. The map can be found at http://petrol.crowdmap.com/.
Reports on Thursday stated that according to the Fuel Retailers' Association, at least 150 service stations in Gauteng and 50 in KwaZulu-Natal had already run dry.
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