This Toronto Star story looks at the gas panic (one I may have contributed to through this space) that erupted here Thursday evening.

An excerpt:

A day after the great gas panic, Toronto service station operators are shaking their heads in bewilderment.

They say there's no shortage of gasoline in Ontario refineries. Those that are running out of gas (and some still are) say that's because, thanks to consumer panic, the delivery trucks which are supposed to refill their underground tanks just can't keep up.

All of the stations I surveyed in downtown and east-end Toronto yesterday were still selling gas at about the same price they were charging the day before — somewhere between $1.02 and $1.07 a litre.

The price of a barrel of oil, which is supposed to ultimately determine what motorists pay, has been dropping. And, in spite of the potential threat to Gulf of Mexico refineries posed by Hurricane Rita, so has the wholesale price of gasoline in the U.S.

So what happened? Where did what the Star yesterday called "gas panic" originate?

For Omar Albar, an attendant at Eastern Auto Gas on Eastern Ave., the media are to blame.

"The media were making people crazy. People would come in and say: `I've heard it's $2.10 in Guelph' and they'd start panicking.

"Otherwise, there was no reason."

Zafar Khokar, manager of the Esso franchise at Front and Sherbourne Sts. makes the same point.

"It was because the media fuelled the hype so much. It was all media. Every 10 minutes on 680 News (a Toronto radio news station that does constant traffic reports) they'd be talking about this."

Indeed, the panic does seem to have begun with a Canadian Press report out of Chatham — quickly picked up by radio stations —that an unnamed gas station there had raised its price to $1.75 a litre.

That was followed by reports of wild line-ups at service stations in Timmins, 800 kilometres north of Toronto. Those, it seems were the result of unfounded rumours that gasoline was about to hit $2.50 a litre.