Almost anything that’s not a single use plastic and has a shape to hold will be made out of hdpe or polypropylene, just like a gas can, or a bucket, or those black and yellow boxes that are everywhere, or believe it or not, gas tanks on most newer ice vehicles.

So, yeah, don’t use a trash bag, but that shouldn’t need to be said.

The main reason you shouldn’t use things for normal storage or transportation is because they don’t handle vapors, or pouring without spilling very well. But you can certainly carry gas up the stairs in a bucket, and you can store gas in a bucket as well, but temperature changes can be problematic over time.

I have a stack of clean buckets that I routinely use when I need to remove the fuel from a vehicle to work in the fuel system. Gas or diesel cans are simply to expensive to keep a dozen on hand to use for an afternoon or a week while replacing a fuel pump or the fuel lines.

And in the case of a 17 floor bucket brigade, also likely too expensive and probably hard to find in the quantities they’d need to make that work, if you assume one bucket each way for 17 floors.

You’re probably not going to walk into an Ace and find 34 5 gallon cans especially when anyone with power is running off a generator. But, you will find that many buckets because it’s also a paint store and they store easily and cost nothing.

So they were probably using buckets, even if it’s true that you shouldn’t put gasoline in a garbage bag.