At about 8 p.m. on 15 December 2009, hundreds of residents queued for kerosene in Binanga, a neighbourhood of Mamuju in Indonesia’s West Sulawesi province. ANTARA’s report describes people crowding the line at a local outlet. Some left empty-handed because the limited stock had already been sold to customers who arrived earlier. This was an evening queue for a basic cooking fuel, not a daytime promotional sale.
Residents said irregular supply had persisted for roughly a month, since the period around Eid al-Adha. The outlet owner explained that two filling stations in Mamuju were themselves repeatedly short because deliveries from Pertamina’s depot in Parepare, South Sulawesi, were unreliable. Daily shipments reached the retail point late and could not meet demand. At the last stage of a chain running from depot to filling station to neighbourhood seller, transport delays became a queue of several hundred households. A place in line was not a reservation: it was the only available claim on stock before that night’s kerosene ran out.