![]() “We burned a lot of wood,” recalled Gordon Weil, who lived in a house with an oil burner, two woodstoves and a fireplace. The struggling Portland Stove Foundry suddenly had more orders than it could fill and police reported thieves breaking into seasonal camps to steal wood stoves. Some dealers were asking $100 for a cord of dry logs, the Associated Press reported, a price equivalent to $690 today. In a state that’s more than 90% forest, firewood became a hot commodity. It could be done, Central Maine Power executives said, but the high-sulfur coal available would increase air pollution. The federal government asked 26 oil-fired plants in the United States to consider converting to coal, including Mason Station in Wiscasset. ![]() Maine lawmakers debated whether to wait until warmer weather in March to begin the 1974 legislative session. Thomas College in Waterville turned thermostats down to 65 degrees during the day, 60 at night and 55 degrees over the Christmas break. The Bass shoe factory in Wilton went to a four-day work week. in Winslow prepared to convert one of its oil boilers to coal. “It’s coming out of peoples’ hides and going into the corporate ledgers.”īusinesses and institutions responded. “A nine-cent increase in the heating oil price in Maine will cost the state’s residents $45 million,” Curtis said. Ken Curtis said people might have to stay temporarily in armories or auditoriums.Įxpressing a concern that sounds familiar today, Curtis and other New England governors worried that big oil companies were using the crisis to increase profits. The state Office of Civil Defense asked each community to ready a shelter large enough to hold four families if they ran out of heat. 23, 1973, a full-page ad in the Portland Evening Express posed a question many were asking: “Will there be enough oil to keep us warm this winter? Power plant operators and fuel oil dealers scrambled to fill storage. Heating oil also shot up after selling that autumn in Maine for 20 cents a gallon, or $1.44 in today’s dollars.īut an even bigger shock was supply, or lack of it. Crude prices quadrupled, sending retail gasoline from 39 to 53 cents a gallon, according to the federal Energy Information Administration. Lacking excess refining capacity, the United States suffered an immediate oil price shock. The embargo introduced a new term into the American lexicon - energy crisis. Only six months, but it forever changed the way Mainers think about energy. 20, 1972, to March 19, 1973, and became known as the Middle East Oil Embargo. ![]() It was the beginning of the quest to shift the state’s economy away from fossil fuels and to renewable, domestic energy sources, a pursuit that continues today. Although it wasn’t apparent during the crisis, October 1973 marked a turning point. The company scouted inland York County instead and picked Sanford. Pachios, who came home to Maine in 1967 after serving as associate White House press secretary to President Lyndon Johnson, told the company it would never get permits for a refinery on the Maine coast. “The answer was to refine oil in New England, to have a secure supply.” “The idea was, we were in the northeast corner of the United States, a long way from the gulf states,” said Harold Pachios, a Portland lawyer who represented New England Energy Co., the pipeline developer. The first reaction was, we need more oil. With the average car getting 12 miles per gallon, there might not be enough gasoline to get to work and school. More than 60% of electricity was generated by oil, raising concerns there might not be enough power to keep the lights on. In 1973, four in five Maine homes burned heating oil, and experts feared there might not be enough fuel to keep everyone warm that winter. And few parts of the country were as vulnerable as Maine. Suddenly, Mainers discovered their way of life threatened by their dependence on energy from unfriendly countries, as the carefree era of cheap petroleum came to a screeching halt. President Richard Nixon’s decision to give Israel emergency financial aid prompted Saudi Arabia and other members of a group few American had heard of - the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC - to retaliate by cutting off oil exports to the United States and Europe. But the need for an oil refinery in Maine seemed obvious to many in 1973, and was reinforced 50 years ago in October when the state received a startling wakeup call.Ī surprise attack on Israel by Egypt and Syria started the Yom Kippur War. Petroleum products from the $650 million project would then be piped to southern New England. Build a major marine terminal in Casco Bay for supertankers to unload crude oil into a pipeline running underground from Portland to a 250,000 gallon-a-day oil refinery in Sanford, 36 miles away.
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