Update: Aron Sced was at the Petro Can station on Lakeshore in Kelowna by 9 Friday morning. He had three 25-litre gas cans lined up beneath the gas pump.
As he filled each one, at $1.239 per litre, nine cents more than the previous day, Sced told of how he heard about the impending gas shortage.
"I have a friend in the industry who said we're going to be out of gas for about a week in western Canada.
Sced said the majority of B.C.'s gas comes from the Edmonton Suncor refinery and it is running dry.
"I'm not taking any chances." Sced is a pilot who flies out of the Vancouver Airport. He commutes to work from Kelowna so depends on gas to make his living.
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Update: Petro Canada says it is taking a number of steps to get gasoline into the tanks of gas station in Western Canada that have run dry.
In addition to trying to fix the problems at the Suncor refinery in Edmonton as quickly as possible by bringing in additional supply to the refinery, it is also restarting its oil sands operations in what it describes as a "safe and staged manner."
Suncor, the parent company of Petro Canada, is also moving gas from other parts of its network and other companies by truck and rail as quickly as it can.
The gas shortage comes on the heels of a nine cent per litre jump in the price of gas Thursday in the Kelowna area. On Friday morning, most stations were selling a litre of unleaded regular gasoline at just under $1.24.
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Original story: An unplanned outage at Suncor's Edmonton oil refinery has left some Petro Canada gas stations across Western Canada, including ones in the Kelowna area, out of gas.
A Perto-Canada spokeswoman told the CBC the shortage is affecting stations in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and B.C. Customers should expect shortages or no gas at all at some stations until the issues in Edmonton are resolved. There is currently no timeframe for when outages may start or the problem resolved.
Not all Petro-Canada gas stations in Kelowna were out of gas first thing Friday morning, but some were, including the station at Underhill and Harvey Avenue in Kelowna.
More to follow.