Standing next to his fuel truck, Steve Brown watches as 9,000 gallons of liquid gold courses through thick orange hoses and into the underground storage tank. It eventually will flow into gas pumps 20 feet away at the Hempfield Service Plaza on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, where sport-utility vehicles, sports cars and recreational vehicles cluster around pumps, their drivers waiting to fill up with $2.43 a gallon gasoline. Brown, a driver from Wilkinsburg, makes fuel deliveries about four times a day to different stations in the region. Yesterday supplies were a bit low, probably because consumers wanted to fill up before prices got any higher.

He likes his job, but he gets tired of being accosted by angry drivers who see his Sunoco rig and then see red. "It makes me mad, like everyone else," he said, "But what else am I going to do?" Businesses around the region are doing something to counter oil prices that reached record highs again yesterday, nearly $67 a barrel. Whether adding a fuel surcharge to counter escalating costs or asking employees to drive more slowly, businesses from the airlines to the neighborhood pizzeria are trying to recoup expenses -- often by passing them on to consumers.

The average gasoline price in Pittsburgh yesterday climbed to $2.375 a gallon, up from $2.359 Thursday. Last year at this time, the average price was $1.859 a gallon, almost a third lower than the current price, said Bevi Norris, spokeswoman for the AAA office that serves Western Pennsylvania and parts of Ohio, West Virginia and New York. Around town, gas prices ranged from $2.33 at a station in Wilkinsburg to $2.55 a gallon at a station on the North Side. For the five-member Kelly family from Detroit, the high prices meant piling into a dented white minivan for a 600-mile road trip.