Colonial Pipeline announced Wednesday that the company has restarted its Line 1, which had been shut down for more than 12 days, causing gasoline shortages and price increases, felt most in places like Georgia, North Carolina and Tennessee.

Though the pipeline that caused those shortages is now flowing again, Colonial warns that it could be "several days" before supplies catch up, and that price increases and shortages could continue in the meantime.

The line was shut down after a leak was discovered that spilled an estimated 336,000 gallons of gasoline into an inactive coal mine site in Shelby County, Ala., about 20 miles south of Birmingham.

Colonial said the pipeline is operating at full capacity with a temporary bypass line diverting flow around the leak site. The line normally transports 1.3 million barrels (or 54.6 million gallons) of gasoline per day from refineries in Houston to distributors throughout the Southeast and East Coast. The line runs through distribution centers in Atlanta and Greensboro, N.C. before stretching up the Eastern Seaboard to New York Harbor.

Fortune magazine described that 36-inch pipeline as "the largest gasoline conduit in the United States," and it has been estimated to carry around 40 percent of all gasoline sold on the Eastern Seaboard.

Since the line went out of service, Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal has issued an order to limit gas price increases, and North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory said his state was currently only receiving "about one third" of its usual amount of fuel.

Patrick DeHaan, an analyst with fuel tracking web site GasBuddy, said gas prices could take two to four weeks to return to normal.

Colonial had originally planned to dig out and repair the leaking gas pipeline, but hazardous fumes from the spilled gasoline kept workers away for days at a time.

On Saturday, the company announced its decision to build a bypass line around the spill site to allow their workers to operate in safe conditions. The bypass section, about 500 feet long, was completed Tuesday, with stress testing and connection to the main line happening today.

After the bypass pipe was connected to the main line, Colonial removed temporary plugging devices that had been installed on either side of the leak site and restarted the line.

The Department of Transportation's Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration signed off on the decision to restart before Colonial operators flipped the switch.

Clean-up and remediation work at the site is ongoing. With the bypass work complete, Colonial employees and contractors can now focus on the remediation and on digging out the leaking section of pipeline to determine the cause.

The approximate location of the leak is shown in the Google map below.