The official start of winter is still a full month away, but the general assistance program in Westbrook and other groups helping citizens with rising fuel costs are already being hit hard.

“I am seeing a huge influx from people I have never seen before,” said Rene Daniel, who runs the Westbrook Housing General Assistance program. He said both senior citizens on fixed incomes and young families are struggling with fuel costs.

“I think it’s bad now, but I haven’t seen the worst of it,” Daniel said.

On Monday, Maine’s Office of Energy Independence and Security announced a drop from last week in the average price of No. 2 home heating oil, but the one penny drop still leaves the cost at $3.10 per gallon, 91 cents higher than this time last year.

At a time when families are celebrating the Thanksgiving holiday, worries about spiraling fuel costs are not far from most people’s minds. Ann Bittner, who runs the Good Samaritan Fund – a community fund supported by a number of local churches – said she’s receiving requests nearly three times as often as this time last year. Bittner’s fund provides 50 gallons of heating fuel to needy families that have exhausted their resources through the general assistance program.

The temperatures have only just begun to drop, but she’s received about 10 requests for heating fuel this month, five of them in the past week.

“I’m getting hit like there’s no tomorrow,” Bittner said on Monday.

Daniel said he’s worked with 12 people just this past Monday and Friday. In rough numbers, Daniel said, he had 30 applications for assistance all last season. This year he’s already recieved 40 applications.

“These people are really hurting,” Daniel said, yet many are afraid to seek assistance because they don’t want anyone to know. He said the best thing for them to know is that they aren’t alone.

Jimmy and Rose Gessner and their three children will be some of the people seeking assistance from wherever they can get it. The family recently made the switch from renting an apartment in Westbrook, where heating was included, to renting a home in Buxton, where heat is now their responsibility.

“We don’t know how we’re going to pay for it,” Gessner said.

The Gessners were at a Thanksgiving dinner Monday evening put on by the Westbrook Salvation Army at the River of Life Church on Bridge Street. Linda Gordon started the kitchen there two years ago this past August, and said many people are faced with a number of choices among food, heat and work.

“It’s not only the fuel to heat their homes, it’s the gas in the car,” Gordon said. “Do I put gas in the car to go to work?”

Gessner is out of work after having torn his esophagus and going through surgery. His wife works at the Salvation Army. They don’t expect to have any problems in qualifying for assistance, but their one comfort is God.

“We’re Christians,” said Rose Gessner. “We know the Lord will provide.”

For some senior citizens, however, husband-wife duos often have combined pensions and Social Security that puts them just over the income limit to qualify for assistance.

“My pension is no higher now than it was 15 years ago when I retired,” Bob Meggison, who retired from Sappi Fine Paper, said after a Westbrook Senior Citizen’s lunch at the Westbrook-Warren Congregational Church. “No troubles last year. I just cried when the oil man came. This year I guess I’ll cry a little bit harder.”

Jamie Py, president of the Maine Oil Dealers Association, said he knows the sight of an oil truck is a sore one for some homeowners. However, he said, the rising cost of oil isn’t helping the dealers, either. “Nobody likes high prices,” he said.

According to Py, rising prices interupt the cash flow all the way through – when the customers can’t pay the dealers, then the dealers can’t pay the suppliers.

“Everybody’s got to deal with it,” he said.

Py said the source of rising costs are high demand for petroleum products, the decreased value of the dollar and excessive speculation about energy futures, where traders enter into a contract to buy petroleum at a future date priced by expected supply and demand.

Customers can try to regulate their spending by prepaying for oil at locked-in prices. However, last winter the price dropped, resulting in those customers paying more than they would have had they not locked in. According to Py, for that reason, many declined that strategy this year, when, as it turns out, it would have been beneficial.

Still, he said, “the whole thing could come crashing down, too, just as easily as it came up.”

Meggison was lucky to have filled his oil tanks earlier this year at $2.10 a gallon. If he had filled them this week at $3.10 a gallon, he’d have paid $635 more to fill his 635 gallon tank, which would have been an unexpected hit.

“We looked into assistance on a lot of this stuff the last two or three years, and we’re just beyond the income limit,” Meggison said. He tried to get relief through the state’s circuit-breaker program, “but I missed that by about $200.”

For Portland resident Angela Guillette, also at Monday’s Westbrook Senior Citizen’s lunch, the rising costs of heat may force her to Florida. Guillette’s husband, Roger, goes to Florida for some of the winter, but she likes to stay in Maine. This year, because of the cost of heating their Portland house and paying to stay in Florida, as well, she may be forced to join him in Florida.

“It’s just too much,” Guillette said. “In the 1970s, when we moved here, it was a $1 a day to heat our house. Now it costs $10 a day.”

T-day Salvation Army 8986 Salvation Army volunteers serve up a full Thanksgiving dinner at the River of Life Church on Bridge Street in Westbrook Monday night. Linda Gordon, who started the soup kitchen two years ago last August, said the crowds can double in the winter when home heating costs go up. She said this year the Monday cafe nights are packing in, and they are thinking about serving on a second night.