Why do we let people freeze in winter? After the collapse of a plan to maintain home heating, shutoff rituals have resumed a familiar pattern for poor Rhode Islanders BY BRIAN C. JONES

THE APPROACH of winter usually finds New Englanders in denial, as if the change of seasons is more of an accident than a celestial certainty. TV weathermen urgently warn of the first frost. And the first snowfall brings out all hands for "team coverage," as reporters and camera crews hasten to highway overpasses for exclusive views of slush and stalled cars.

But in Rhode Island, the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of families that worry about one of winter’s harshest realities — going without heat or electricity because they haven’t paid their utility bills — began preparing for the season long in advance. Two years ago, the residents, their advocates, and others started work on a plan to halt the annual round of winter shutoffs, potentially keeping natural gas and electricity flowing into households of the working poor, the elderly, and mothers and children on welfare.

This broad-based group of community advocacy organizations, utility company experts, state officials and public policy "wonks" agreed on two points:

• People with threadbare incomes should be required to pay only part of their energy bills, since that’s all they can afford.

• Similarly, those families with impossibly big back bills should have them wiped out for the same reason: a lack of money.

But this fall, things fell apart. As one might guess, there was an angry dispute about who should pony up the millions of dollars that that the poor wouldn’t be sending to Narragansett Electric and the New England Gas Company. As a result, this winter will probably be no different from any other. There will be delirious excitement over the first snowstorm, old people will slip and break their hips, superintendents will puzzle over whether to call off school, and if it’s an especially snowy season, newspapers will write about how cities and towns have exhausted their snowplowing budgets.

And from Westerly to Woonsocket, Exeter to Tiverton — and surely in South Providence, Elmwood, the West End, and other poor neighborhoods in Rhode Island — families will spend at least a portion of the meanest months of winter with their gas off or the lights out. Among them could be Diane Rose, 26, and her kids — Charlene, 9; Robert, 7; and Angelina, 3 — in their "new" three-bedroom on Providence’s Branch Avenue.

During a recent hearing when the state Division of Public Utilities and Carriers (PUC) was looking into the shutoff issue, Rose described how she’s been without gas since moving in August 18, because the gas company wanted her to first pay a $2500 back bill.

Rose testified that by talking with the gas company and seeking help from other sources — including a federally funded program with the Dickensian acronym of LIHEAP (Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program) — she came within $330 of being able to make the down payment that would have gotten the heat turned back on. But that final $330 might as well be $3 billion, Rose said during the hearing and in an interview afterward.

She had moved from her old apartment to get away from a menacing individual whom she believed intended to assault her. The rent for the new apartment is $925, about to go to $950 in December, an increase, she says, that she doesn’t expect the landlord to use to close holes where squirrels get in.

Rose’s monthly $1600 income includes welfare payments for two of her kids, plus federal disability payments to herself and her son, who were injured when they fell down a flight of stairs — she initially thought the fall had killed him. The outstanding $2500 gas bill, she says, goes back to when she was a teenager living with her mother, who apparently didn’t keep up with the payments, and put utility bills in Rose’s name. So although Rose has some money left after the rent to pay for utilities, food, and clothes, it’s not enough to pay all of her bills. And, at least the day when she testified, she couldn’t raise the final $330 needed to get the heat back on.

"The situation is very hard to explain," Rose testified before the PUC. "The kids are always sick. They are under four and five blankets, and they will curl up into a little ball . . . " She stopped at that image and started to cry.

The prospect of families without heat stops people cold.

"One likes to think that we have at least enough resources in this wealthiest country on earth to provide a minimum of shelter and heat and support for all of our neighbors," says US Senator Jack Reed, who, year after year, pushes for more heating assistance money. "And when we don’t do that, and we continue to see that year after year, it’s a sad commentary."

AN ASTONISHGLY LARGE number of households have their gas and electric service cut off every year for non-payment of bills — more than 24,000 in one year. From January through September of this year, 16,492 households had their electricity or gas turned off, according to figures from the state Division of Public Utilities and Carriers, the administrative agency that supervises utilities. Most homes get their utilities turned back on. For example, the PUC said, there were 10,467 utility service "restorations" through September, meaning that 6025 households were possibly still without gas or power.

Henry Shelton, the activist 73-year-old former priest who for decades has championed the home-heating cause, uses this 6000 figure to measure the problem. But the PUC and the electric and gas companies say the actual figure may be smaller.

For example, Terry L. Schwennesen, general counsel to Narragansett Electric, told the PUC hearing that of 1879 remaining homes listed as having their electricity disconnected, 500 were probably still without power, and of those, just 51 were eligible for federal aid. Many homes are restored, she says, under the names of other bill-payers. At New England Gas, spokesman Christopher Medici says that of the approximately 4132 listed as still turned off, about 400 — about 10 percent –— are income-eligible for federal LIHEAP grants. He says the company doesn’t know how many actually remain shut off.

Other experts say the figures are elusive.

PUC spokesman Terrence E. Mercer says the agency finds credible the utility companies’ view that at least some of the non-restorations are not families in crisis, but such situations as college students leaving town without paying bills, a death in the family, residents moving to other states, and homes that are temporarily vacant. "It’s very difficult to get hard numbers on terminations," Mercer says. "My gut feeling is that it’s far closer to the lower number — in the hundreds — than the 6000 figure."

Shelton responds that he’s using the only statistics available from the PUC itself, and that the state and the utilities have no system to pin down the number. Whatever the case, he believes there are far too many households in trouble.

"Is it less than 6000?" asks Shelton, his voice rising in anger. "It could be. But if it’s 4000, it’s almost like murder — 4000 murders. It’s much too many. It jeopardizes children’s lives. I’m not going to stake my life on 6000. But I’m going to stake my life that it is cruel and immoral that so many people are left defenseless."

GAS SERVICE in Milagrosa Rosa’s apartment on Atlantic Avenue in Providence’s Elmwood section was turned off June 18 — immediately after leaks were discovered in her gas stove and the furnace of the three-story building.

Although Rosa remembers a strange smell in the apartment, she was unaware of the leak until her three-year-old son, Luis, started throwing up and she took him to a hospital emergency room. Doctors said the toddler had been breathing in natural gas and that she should call the gas company immediately. It was because of Luis that Rosa — who is 20 and has a two-year-old daughter and a month-old son — moved to South Providence in the first place; he’d been found to have been heavily lead-poisoned.

The boy is still exhibiting the signs of severe lead poisoning. He’s so hyperactive, Rosa says, that either she or her mother, who lives across the street, must constantly watch him as he tears around the apartment until, exhausted, he suddenly falls limp and asleep in their arms. One day, when a visiting nurse was in the apartment, Rosa says, Luis grabbed her keys and jammed one into an electrical outlet, causing a severe electrical shock. It was during that visit to the emergency room, Rosa says, when doctors discovered that Luis may have a critical heart problem.

Rosa says the landlord told her he’d fixed the stove leak. But she says the gas company has so far refused to turn the gas back on because there’s a back bill in her name for more than $2600. Rosa disputes that. She says the big bill is a carryover from her mother’s account, when her mother briefly put both bills in Rosa’s name when Rosa was switching apartments.

Although she can’t pay the back bill, Rosa thinks she can manage the monthly payments. Even though her $635 monthly welfare check is much smaller than her $850 rent, incremental progress seems possible thanks to her recent receipt of a Section 8 federal housing grant, which requires her to pay only one-third of her income for rent.

But in the meantime, as Rosa tries to untangle the gas bill problem among the many crises she’s juggling, the young mother and her three children sleep in a bedroom that they warm with two electrical heaters, and cook on a hotplate balanced on a cold radiator in the kitchen.