Eric Friets wore an orange hard hat with attached ear muffs to dim the sound of three log-splitting machines, all of which buzzed like car engines and smelled like them, too. He worked alone on the smallest splitter, borrowed from the Town of Norwich, while the other volunteers at the Norwich Wood Bee split logs in teams of two.
Friets kept one hand on his splitter’s joystick, like one from an arcade claw machine, and pushed the heavy blade into the wood. He used the other, in a mustard-yellow MADE IN VERMONT glove, to hold the stump steady by its bark-covered outside, safe from the line of splitting.
Upper Valley residents face a winter defined by heating costs higher than any in recent memory, due in large part to the war in Iran. The conflict in the Middle East has limited oil movement through the Strait of Hormuz, through which about a fifth of the world’s daily oil usually passes. As a result, fuel costs have surged globally, and the Upper Valley, thousands of miles from the fighting, will feel the effects when it gets too cold to keep the heat off.
Before the cold weather really sets in, Friets and his friend Ethan Foster deliver cords of dried wood cut the year prior. Friets drives his gray Tacoma to homes across Norwich that have requested free firewood to help them stay warm through the winter.
Last year, thanks to a donation of dried and split wood from a family moving out of town, he and Foster delivered 22 cords. This year, like most years, they expect to offer around 15 cords — probably no more than one per household. Demand has grown higher than ever.
Volunteer efforts like the Norwich Wood Bee, along with heating grants from nonprofits and government funds, try to alleviate the stress of heating costs for Upper Valley residents every winter. But with demand so high this year, these organizations may not have enough aid for everyone in need.
Friets doesn’t know why the event is called the Norwich Wood Bee; when he took it over six years ago, that was its name. He does, however, know how to run the bee; an Eagle Scout from Staten Island, Friets learned how to chop wood at a summer job on a farm and campground in upstate New York. Now, after summer heat has retreated but before the weather turns too cold, Friets assembles a cadre of volunteers — mostly his fellow Norwich firefighters — to split a shed’s worth of firewood for the following winter, giving it a year to dry.
“It’s the right thing to do,” Steve Foltz, a retired volunteer firefighter, said at the Wood Bee’s second workday of the season Oct. 17.
With four others, Foltz, 76, joined Friets at the woodlot on Beaver Meadow Road for a cold Saturday morning spent splitting logs. He and Rob MacCormick, 61, worked together splitting the largest pieces on MacCormick’s splitter: the biggest of the bunch, fittingly fire-truck red and decked out with a three-blade axe. Another volunteer firefighter, Nate Hadden, 42, pushed wheelbarrows of firewood to the half-full shed, stacking them in neat rows that will remain until next fall.
As of Monday, regular gasoline averaged $4.20 a gallon in New England, up $1.27 from a year ago. The national average was $4.27, up $1.23. Diesel in New England was $6.42 a gallon, up $2.49.
Heating fuels are also expensive. In New Hampshire, fuel oil averages $6 a gallon, propane $4.12 and kerosene $6.91, according to the state Department of Energy. The National Energy Assistance Directors Association projects that heating a home with oil will cost 31.3% more this winter.
Rising fuel costs have affected nearly every home-heating method, including wood prices. To produce 15 cords of wood, Friets and his team use gasoline and oil to power chainsaws that cut tree trunks into stove-length pieces, then use about three gallons of fuel to power each log splitter. To deliver last year’s wood, Friets drives his pickup truck with an attached trailer to at least 12 different homes. On a commercial scale, the fuel costs would hit much harder than they do for the grassroots team running the Norwich Wood Bee.
Lincoln Farm Timber Harvesting, a logging operation based in Randolph, has stopped offering one-cord and long-distance deliveries for its firewood customers. The company has not raised its firewood prices this fall because most of its wood comes from existing inventory, but owner Sam Lincoln has still felt the increased fuel costs.
“We are just trying to navigate the fuel costs like everyone else,” he said. “We are just trying to find our way through it.”
A cord of wood consists of split wood stacked tightly together, measuring 4 by 4 by 8 feet. Friets uses between two and three cords to heat his home for the winter, but he also has a heat pump and an energy-efficient house. Older or less cleverly designed homes might use closer to four cords, or more, in a season.
‘Do I want to stay warm or do I want to eat?’
David Vautour heats his home in Newbury with wood and propane. He cannot afford his heating costs.
“It sucks,” Vautour said as he paid for a gallon of 2% milk at the West Lebanon Walmart on Monday.
Vautour, a 76-year-old widower with a long gray beard, has chronic pain in both legs thanks to the knees he broke 25 years ago. He receives a fixed income from Social Security and cannot work if he wants to stay on the medicine he takes for his pain.
When his wife Susan died 2 1/2 years ago, Vautour stayed in their home, all of a sudden paying for the same utility bills on half the income. Now, he’s looking to move somewhere cheaper, with lower heating costs — probably in West Lebanon, he said.
Social Security will give Vautour some heating assistance this winter, though he does not know how much and suspects it will not be enough. He already struggles to buy the groceries he needs: Monday’s purchase included two bags of broccoli chicken Knorr rice that he cuts with extra rice at home to fill him up. The high cost of fuel means he has to skimp even more in the colder months if he wants to heat his home. He humbles his pride, he said, and goes to food pantries to supplement the little he can afford. He cooks food in his microwave, avoiding the oven to save fuel.
In the winter, Vautour often asks himself: “What’s more important at the moment? Do I want to stay warm or do I want to eat?”
‘So many people living on the edge’
Once a month, Vautour goes to LISTEN’s food pantry in Lebanon. The nonprofit is one of several organizations where Upper Valley residents can seek financial heating assistance; others include the Tri-County Community Action Program, the Vermont Agency of Human Services, Social Security and, if they live in Lyme, the Pearl Dimick Fund.
To be eligible for a heating grant from LISTEN, recipients must live in one of its service area towns, which stretch from Randolph to Hartland in Vermont and from Orford to Springfield in New Hampshire. LISTEN’s Heating Helpers program pays assistance directly to the company that provides heating to a household and subsidizes whatever type of fuel a client prefers to use to heat their home. There is no application process.
Programs Director Heather Griffin said LISTEN has seen a year-over-year increase in fuel prices since the winter of 2019 to 2020. This year, however, an annual hop has turned into a leap. Between July and September, the nonprofit received 8.1% more requests for fuel deliveries than it did during the same period last year, but spent 39.8% more on fuel, indicating a significant increase in the price of fuel compared with a relatively small increase in the number of people who need help affording it.
LISTEN advertises $400 heating grants, but buys fuel based on quantity, not price. The organization aims to provide 100 gallons of fuel — or the rough equivalent in non-liquid forms — to each household. Last year, that meant an average of $395.40 spent on each client. As of early October, the average for this fiscal year sits at $511 for the same amount.
Griffin hopes LISTEN will be able to serve around the same number of families it did last year: 751. But the organization has a budget, and with the price of fuel so much higher now, there is no guarantee that it will. And because there has been higher demand for help, there’s also the chance that Upper Valley families in need of assistance will be left to fend off the cold by themselves.
The median reported income among households who signed up for Heating Helpers between August and October was $26,000.
Tara McGovern, chair of the committee for the Pearl Dimick Fund in Lyme, also anticipates more community members will request heating assistance this winter than in past years, when the fund gave out an average of 15 grants. She and her team have $18,000 budgeted for community assistance this year.
“There are already so many people living on the edge,” McGovern said.
Dimick served as town clerk in Lyme for many years, and when she died, she bequeathed her estate to the Lyme Foundation to provide emergency financial assistance to Lyme residents. An endowment from Dimick’s estate, along with a small number of community donations, sustains the fund.
This time of year, emergency assistance grants from the Pearl Dimick Fund usually take the form of heating aid. Through the fund, the Lyme Foundation offers up to $900 per household, an advantage of its small service area, contained within Lyme. Its separate but similar Dorcas Chaffee fund provides emergency assistance to former Lyme residents who have remained close to the town.
Unlike LISTEN, the Lyme Foundation requires applications for assistance from the Dimick Fund. McGovern and her team evaluate need on a blind, case-by-case basis, taking both income and expenses into consideration. Rarely do they turn away applicants, though the amounts they give vary by household.
Federal funds from the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) enable Tri-County CAP to serve residents of Grafton, Carroll and Coos counties. Eighty-seven percent of the organization’s clients qualify as “priority,” indicating that their households contain someone 60 or older, a child under 6, someone with a disability — or that they heat with wood, which takes longer to coordinate than simply wiring money to a heating company, according to Michelle Sanschagrin, director of energy assistance programs for Tri-County CAP.
State requirements say Tri-County CAP applicants must make less than or equal to 60% of the New Hampshire median income: $48,713 a year for a household of one. As of Oct. 13, 2,014 people had successfully enrolled in the heating assistance program, meaning the organization will deliver a one-time payment to the company of each client’s choice as early as Dec. 1.
New Hampshire awarded Tri-County CAP $5.2 million in federal LIHEAP funds for this season, $800,000 more than last year. The organization also has $1.8 million in leftover funds from last winter. That’s $7 million of heating assistance the organization can award this year as cold Granite Staters continue to apply for help.
“This year is going to be a rough year,” Sanschagrin said.
Beaver Meadow Road
On the mid-October day Friets hosted the second Wood Bee workday of the season, small pellets of hail fell from a sky that had been sunny moments earlier. The volunteers took shelter under the shed roof they had been filling with firewood for a brief respite from their work and the weather.
After just a few moments, though, the hail stopped, and the sun crept back out. Friets looked over at his friends and — as polite as can be — told them to get back to work.
Paulina Umansky, 25, had to leave early, so Friets took over carting firewood to the shed while Hadden joined Aaron Lamperti, 61, at his splitter. Between barrels, Friets dragged the heaviest ash wood logs he could find closer to the splitting machines. He used a tarp to drag one gnarly stump to Foltz and MacCormick. Both men used two hands to hoist it onto the splitter.
Most of the people the Norwich Wood Bee serves can’t chop their own wood because of old age or disabilities that keep this kind of physical activity out of reach.
It took a joint effort, but Foltz and MacCormick hacked several nice pieces out of the monster log and threw them all unceremoniously into a wheelbarrow. Friets dragged them away to stack with the rest of the wood. Next year, they’ll warm someone up.
