In January 1942, Karl Doenitz sent his U-boat wolf packs to the east coast of the United States. There they had their second "happy time". The US navy was ill prepared to face the U-boat onslaught. They did not have an organized convoy system and the owners of sea side resorts did not observe night time black outs until May 18, 1942. Earlier attempts to enforce these black outs were resisted from Atlantic City NJ to Miami Beach. They complained that their tourist season would be ruined and the general public that had a "a quest for pleasure that was almost grim in its intensity" backed the resort owners.
Seventy percent of tonnage sunk off the east coast were oil tankers and oil slicks polluted almost every beach south of Atlantic City in the summer of 1942. The government was having a hard time containing this bad news. On June 15 1942 two oil tankers were sunk so close to Virginia Beach that some ten thousand civilians saw them explode and sink. Fortunately, the US Federal government did not have a Department of Homeland Security or Transportation Security Administration in place the time. Otherwise those civilians might have found themselves packed off to an internment camp like the Japanese Americans on the West Coast.
The situation was so dire, Ernest King, the Chief Naval Officer, took direct command of the ASW efforts. Convoys were organized and more airplanes like PBM Mariner flying boasts, blimps and PB4Y Privateers were deployed, replacing ineffective pre-war planes like the B-18 Bolo bombers. Oil tankers stopped sailing along the east coast and the US railroad industry was able to barely cope with the flood of oil that had to move from Texas to the northeast. Two major pipe-lines were quickly constructed to relieve the overtaxed railroad industry of the burden of moving so much petroleum.
The government did not take any efforts to mitigate the news of the U-boats being so close to home. It took steps to defeat the U-boat threat and overcome the shortage of oil tankers in 1942 and 1943.
Sources: "The Burning Shore: How Hitler's U-boats Brought World War II to America" by Ed Offley 2014
"The Battle of the Atlantic: September 1939-May 1943" Volume I of the "History of United States Naval Operations in World War II: by Samuel Eliot Morison 1947
"Black Gold by the Trainload" by David Jones Classic Trains Special Edition No. 6 2008