“We had about fifty vehicles out of a hundred, in all, which were driving this Saturday. Sunday, there will be about 35”, details Saturday, October 15 on franceinfo Philippe Premat, president of Premat transport, based in Essonne (Ile-de-France) and specialist in the transport of petroleum products. It is the largest petroleum product carrier in the region.
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This is the second weekend in which carriers are allowed to circulate to bail out dry stations, while the strike continues in some French refineries. Philippe Premat hopes that “by the end of the month, if there are no new events, it will be resolved”. As for the stations to be delivered in priority, it is not he who decides: “What the tankers are trying to do today is to prioritize motorway stations […] Then they try to prioritize where there are the biggest gaps to balance deliveries.”
franceinfo: How is it going for you this weekend? How many trucks do you have driving?
Philippe Prémat: We were called upon because we benefit from reserve stocks. We can catch up a bit. We had about fifty vehicles out of a hundred in all that were driving this Saturday. Sunday, there will be around 35. Last week, already, we had vehicles on the road on Saturday and Sunday and we cannot run our drivers two weekends in a row so we alternate. There, we have about a third of the workforce which is present on Saturday to continue to deliver the stations and try to catch up. We hope that by the end of the month, if there are no new events, it will be resolved. We have rarely experienced this.
Are there bonuses for your company’s drivers who drive on weekends?
Sure. In general, our drivers only work every other Saturday morning and never on Sunday. There, it is exceptional. Consequently, on Sundays, they are paid double for the hours they work and they are given bonuses because it is not always easy. They may have family, sports or other obligations. We therefore thank them with bonuses that they richly deserve.
How many stations will you be able to bail out this weekend?
We deliver between 250 and 300 stations per day. This Saturday, we were able to deliver a hundred stations and, on Sunday, we are going to deliver around fifty, I think. This will allow us to catch up a bit. The number of rounds we make per day, these are unit deliveries of 35,000, 36,000 liters each time so when you make 300 deliveries per day up to 35,000 liters, that’s still a lot of fuel .
In Île-de-France, are there stations to be bailed out as a priority?
It’s not us who decide which stations to deliver, it’s our customers who are mainly oil companies and large retailers. Tankers try to prioritize motorway stations because on the motorways there are safety issues and it would be dangerous to have broken down vehicles. There are therefore few stations on the highway that are out of stock. Then, they try to prioritize according to geographical areas, where there are the biggest shortages to balance deliveries. They try to deliver to all stations at least once a day so that there is a minimum of products and consumers can refuel more easily. We, on the Île-de-France, there are all the highways that lead to Paris: the A6, the A1, the A3, the A4 and the A13. Then, we supply all the stations that are on the A86 and the N104 since these are roads with very heavy traffic. Our customers try to favor these stations, when possible.