As far as all this tanking up is concerned, I don't think there is some sort of grand conspiracy involved. Roughly how many hours, days or months supply do you believe a gas station could store? Hours sir, is the correct answer, especially if the station is being hammered by customers filling the tank to escape the area ahead of a natural disaster. Would you like to be on the hook for a couple hundred transports full of fuel that cannot be delivered due to rising flood waters, police barriers, and closed or flooded customers? Are you quite sure the storage lots where those transports are stored is both secure and dry? Are you quite sure you are insured for such an ecological disaster as well as economical? Myself, I don't like to be refered to as Defendant.
The economic reality is that few tank farms sit around full of fuel. I don't know all the reasons behind this reality, no doubt the PTB are behind it somehow

. The tanker shipping would necessarily be at sea during a hurricane, stacking up no doubt. The ports are unable to accept an unlimited supply of oil all at one time, the tankers are bringing a weeks supply of product a week late and trying to unload it into a system designed to handle a couple days supply per day.
You do not design a city the size of NYC for the absolute worse case scenario. It is absurd to even attempt to do so. The best that can be done is to design some over capacity into the system, then pray it is not used up before it has been completed. Think about it, the only major US city with the amount of overcapacity you would need is Detroit, Mi., and I'm betting that the vast majority of that is rundown and unable to run at design capacity.
People do not like to be reminded they are but a small part of the natural world. A storm of this nature is a bitch slap in the face to those who have done everything within their power to divorce themselves from natural laws. The lattes will soon be ready, Broadway plays will resume, and all will once again be as it was. The populace will be three days from starvation and anarchy, just as it was last week.