I believe you but this never made sense to me. A random internet search shows that there are on the order of 100k gas stations in the USA. It seems like FEMA could come up with on the order of $20M to buy generators for all of them and make them come up with a plan to operate without electric power.
Although maybe it costs more than I think? This "industry lobbyist"[1] claims $40k PER PUMP which seems much more expensive than the ~$2000/station I was estimating.
However they do not require generators on site, and only require companies with a 10 or more stations in a county to have generators available, but then only within 24 hours.
This is more regulation than I had expected!
There was great article on HN years ago about a Canadian (New Brunswick, maybe?) gas station run by a former software engineer, and how he had planned for an outage by getting a generator for his station. But when the power outage happened, he was too far away to get back to his station, and couldn't find a place to fill up to get back. Wish I could find it again...
Although maybe it costs more than I think? This "industry lobbyist"[1] claims $40k PER PUMP which seems much more expensive than the ~$2000/station I was estimating.
1: https://www.cnbc.com/id/49667864