Northeast braces for home heating oil increases (lots of quotes from Small biz hearing)

[beachmom]

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2008/06/28/northeast_braces_for_home_heating_oil_increases/

Northeast braces for home heating oil increases

New Englanders struggling this summer to pay gas prices topping $4 a gallon should brace for more bad news -- home heating oil costs next winter are expected to hit record highs.

One retail heating oil dealer says she expects a typical household delivery that cost $500 last winter will climb to at least $850 this winter.

"It's going to be staggering," said Northboro Oil Co. owner Sandra Farrell in telephone interview with The Associated Press. "It's going to be a real problem going into this winter for everyone unless something changes."

Farrell, whose family has owned and operated the Northborough, Mass., business since 1953, said some dealers are talking about prices in the $4.89 per gallon range for the coming winter, about $2 more per gallon than last winter. An average household usually needs four deliveries from December to March, she said.

...

About 40 percent of Massachusetts homes use oil heat. More than 963,000 households in the state use home heating oil which is delivered by more than 800 distributors, many of them small businesses. In Maine, one of the nation's coldest states, four out of five households heat with oil.

Farrell told a Senate panel she expects high heating oil costs will force many cash-strapped families to make tough choices between eating and staying warm.

...

Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., who heads the Small Business panel, warned of an impending crisis in the Northeast, which is more reliant on oil heat than other regions.

"It is reality not rhetoric that price spikes will force people to decide whether to feed their families or heat their homes," Kerry said at the hearing.

Maine Sen. Olympia Snowe, the panel's ranking Republican member, said high oil prices are a matter of life and death. She said parts of Maine could literally "become uninhabitable" for many this winter.

The whole article is interesting, and frankly, it is scary. This could be a major disaster, if assistance isn't set up on time. I am glad that both Kerry and Snowe have been so proactive on this. You don't wait for disaster; you prepare for it.