It is bone-chillingly cold inside Ocie Lee Bare's tiny Smithsburg house.
The doors are shut tight and the windows are covered in plastic, but frigid air is pushing through the cracks and holes of her Western Maryland home. Although the heat pump is running, constantly, and about a third of her income goes to pay her electric bill, Bare has to hang blankets in the entryways of the living room to hold back drafts and throw three or four quilts on her bed at night.
But on a recent morning, even with experts predicting heating bills will rise as much as 50 percent this winter, the 70-year-old widowed mother of seven grown children was smiling.
That's because after she has spent two years on the waiting list for the federally funded Weatherization Assistance Program, help has arrived. And none too soon: With the expected rise in heating bills, programs that provide energy assistance have seen a jump in applications even as they struggle to assist those already on waiting lists. In Maryland, applications for energy assistance have risen 14 percent so far this winter.
"It's starting to warm in the house," Bare said as workers caulked windows, sealed cracks and blew insulation into the wall cavities and attic of her house. "I can feel it already. It feels good."
By the time they're finished - at a cost of about $6,000, but free to Bare - the improvements are expected to shave 40 percent off the $200 to $300 she pays in utility bills during the winter months and better protect her from nature's icy wrath.
This winter, though, advocates fear the need for energy assistance could outstrip resources.
"We're already seeing a spike in the need," says David Bradley, executive director of the National Community Action Foundation, a nonprofit organization that lobbies for low-income programs and works with the government to implement the weatherization program.
"There are thousands and thousand of people who are eligible for weatherization and there is no shortage of applicants, but we can't afford to do it all. People who do qualify are put on a waiting list for five years.
"It's not a good outlook," Bradley says. "It's not a happy outlook. ... Some of these agencies will exhaust their resources by the second week of January."
This year, even those who normally can handle their heating bills are feeling the pinch.
