BELFAST, Maine - While prices are lower this winter, the high cost of oil and kerosene in recent years has pushed more Mainers to embrace a cheaper alternative that has kept families here warm for generations - firewood.
In the Northeast, use of wood as a primary heating fuel has risen by as much as 50 percent over the past decade, according to a report last year by the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
It can still be tough, though, for poor families and seniors on fixed incomes to afford all the wood they need to make it through the winter. Now, a grassroots effort in one Maine county aims to give these vulnerable residents some help.
Families that struggle to pay their heating bills often come to Keith Small for relief. Small runs Waldo Community Action Partners, the agency that oversees the county's home energy assistance program.
"For the folks that we serve with oil, or with propane, as their primary fuel benefit," says Small, "I'm sure a lot of them - just knowing my neighbors here in this region - have wood as a supplement."
Small scans a sheet of paper filled with program statistics. Last winter, he says, nearly 2,000 households in Waldo County applied for help with their heating bills. He says more than 100 families last winter listed wood as their primary heating source.
"Low-income home energy assistance certainly doesn't come anywhere near close, in most cases, to meeting their entire wood need for the year," Small says.
The average energy assistance grant for families heating with oil is around $600. It's between $200 and $275 for wood, which will get you roughly one seasoned cord. Small says these families, and even those that burn wood as secondary source, often struggle to come up with the additional logs they need to make it through the winter.
But some county residents with ties to the forest products industry have a plan to ease that burden.
"This is the saw shack. This is where we saw two of our products actually," says Dawn Caswell.
A band saw called the "Wood Mizer" cuts oval planks from logs at Maine Grilling Woods in the town of Waldo. Dawn Caswell's company ships the grilling planks, hardwood chunks and smoking chips to barbeque enthusiasts across the country.
"We create quite a bit of waste," she says. Caswell points at a pile of discarded cedar on the saw shack floor. "This is all product that we'll be able to put into production for the wood bank."
Just after New Year's, a friend of Caswell's came up with a plan to get wood, free of charge, to people in need. Bob MacGregor runs the Waldo County Woodshed. MacGregor says he got the idea for the new non-profit after reading an op-ed piece in the Bangor Daily News last fall. "And I was reading that and I'd never even heard of a wood bank," he says. "And it was just a very obvious thing to do, like a food bank."
MacGregor, who owns a Belfast gift shop, used to run the Maine Wood Products Association. He knows lots of people in the business, like Dawn Caswell, and began calling foresters, lumber companies and others to see if they would be willing to donate money, wood or labor.
MacGregor says he originally envisioned being able to make wood available to people next winter. But donations, including more than $1,000 in cash, have come in quickly and the Woodshed has already been able to help one woman who ran out of firewood before the big blizzard last week.
"We just kind of set the whole thing up by text and e-mail. She was able to get wood the next day," MacGregor says. "Two of her family members came down to Waldo, shoveled out the pile and hauled it home in their pickup truck."
A handful of wood banks are up and running throughout New England. Maine has as many as three other wood banks, including longstanding operations in the town of Boothbay and in Cumberland County. A Bucksport resident is also trying to launch one there.
By next winter, the Waldo County Woodshed hopes to have 100 cords of wood stored and ready for delivery.