By Doug Kesseli
Bangor Daily News (Maine)
Copyright 2006 Bangor Daily News
BANGOR, Maine — Cutting it close, a Penobscot County committee on Monday put the finishing touches on the draft of a plan for how the county would handle an outbreak of avian influenza, one day before the report was due.
After a delayed start, members of the county’s leadership committee developing the plan said the draft plan would be ready by today’s deadline set by the state.
“We are working very fast to get those pieces together,” Matthew Chandler, pandemic influenza planning coordinator for the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said by telephone Monday morning. Chandler has worked with other counties and participated in the Penobscot County leadership committee meeting Monday afternoon at the Penobscot Community Health Care offices in Bangor.
Guidelines established by the state asked counties this spring to identify procedures for preparing and responding to an outbreak, from making sure people have access to food and other necessities to distributing medical supplies.
“The important thing is that it’s going,” committee member Kathy Knight said Monday. Knight is director of the Northeastern Regional Resource Center, a federally funded disaster management program affiliated with Eastern Maine Healthcare Systems in Bangor.
Knight noted that much work already had been developed through other efforts, from a recent all hazards mitigation plan to medical and media conferences and a model for distributing medicines developed through the Bangor Region Influenza Coalition.
On Monday, Chandler said while important, the deadline was set as a way to gauge progress being made. He said that the drafts would serve as a formal “check-in” for the counties, allowing the state to “see what they have been doing and what still needs to be done.”
The state will review the plans and counties will be asked to make revisions where necessary in a process that Chandler said could take a year or more to complete.
Although all counties were expected to file their drafts by today, other counties have had a jump on Penobscot County.
. Cumberland County’s leadership committee has met eight to 10 times since the counties received the 15-page guidelines this spring, compared to the two meetings this month for Penobscot County, according to state and committee officials.
. Knox County has been working on the plan for more than three months.
. In Franklin County, an ambulance service and local school districts took the unusual step of reaching an agreement that would allow school bus drivers to supplement ambulance drivers if an outbreak closed schools. The bus drivers could replace ambulance drivers that are out sick or allow the ambulance drivers to assist with the patient in the back.
Such innovative and cooperative approaches are what the state is looking for in the plans, Chandler said.
A Penobscot County official said that the delay in work on the plan was in part intentional.
Anticipating changes from the state, Tom Robertson, the Penobscot County Emergency Management Agency director, said on Friday that it made sense to see how the changes would shake out before doing extensive work.
The state, for example, had initially asked counties to develop a strategy for the storage of corpses, something it later designated to funeral directors or state officials, he said.
“That is not something that the county can or would take on,” said Robertson, who was not able to make Monday’s meeting.
“There’s going to be fits, there’s going to be starts, there’s going to be changes,” Robertson said on Friday.
In a departure from other counties, Robertson said the leadership committee, composed of representatives of law enforcement, hospitals, public health, municipal and emergency management agencies, focused on developing the plan, with the idea of presenting the plan to a wider audience for review later.
But even before the report was in the state’s hands, committee members on Monday were saying more participation was needed and soon.
“We need to expand the circle so people can tell us” what else is needed, Shawn Yardley, director of Bangor’s department of health and welfare and committee member, said Monday.