Hurricane sent NJ gas prices rising. When will they come back down?

Those eye-popping gas price spikes should peak in the next few days, but prices will remain unsettled for a week or more, according to Patrick DeHaan of gasbuddy.com.

The average pump price in New Jersey has gone from $2.39 a gallon to $2.78 in one week.

DeHaan says things have started flowing again at refineries and in pipelines, and that will translate into a price decline.

"By next week at some point, we could start to see prices going back down."

But until then there will be pain at the pump, as well as volatility around Jersey. How much? According to DeHaan, "Do not be surprised if one station is 20 or 30 cents-a-gallon higher or lower than another."

He says earlier problems with transport from the Texas area have also been resolved.

"It had been part of the problem. There had been power outages. Colonial Pipeline was not receiving a whole lot of product, and getting that product to market had been a challenge. Things are starting to flow now. Certainly not quite normal, but more importantly, gasoline is starting to flow from some of those previously shutdown refineries in Texas. And that is likely to have an impact on gasoline prices and supply in the days and weeks ahead.

DeHaan says he knows that it seems as though prices go up a lot faster than they come down.

"Frankly, from the wholesale prices that we monitored, retail prices took several days to start following the big increases at the wholesale level. I know that it is hard to see, being a motorist. You only see what is happening on the retail level. But there was a window that allowed us to tell people that gas prices were about to go up, and that gas prices do generally go slower on the downside because stations so often lost money when prices spiked so significantly."

Joe Cutter is the afternoon news anchor on New Jersey 101.5

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