It’s hard to miss the rising prices at the gas pump.  On Monday (2/22) in Oskaloosa, the price of a gallon of unleaded soared into the $2.70 range. Meredith Mitts, a public affairs specialist with Triple-A Iowa and Minnesota says the cold weather that recently hit the central US is to blame.

“That also extended down towards Texas and to the gulf, where a lot of our refineries are.  With the cold weather that’s been hitting those areas and the amount of power outages they had, we had close to 40% of the US crude production offline.  So that makes a pain at the pump until operations can resume to normal.”

Mitts says gas prices should start to go down once the oil refineries are fully up and running again.