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Maine House report offers ways to improve the state’s response to disaster
By PAUL CARRIER
Portland Press Herald (Maine)
AUGUSTA, Maine — Maine needs better emergency radio links and backup generators at new schools to improve the state’s ability to cope with a terrorist attack or other emergencies. Those are two of the recommendations of the state Task Force to Study Maine’s Homeland Security Needs, which will release an interim report this week. The report contends that the federal government is shortchanging rural states like Maine when distributing grants awarded by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
The 11-member panel, which includes lawmakers from both major parties and public members, plans to submit legislation this week to improve the state’s emergency-response system. The panel wants the state to incorporate emergency planning into school curriculums, upgrade the qualifications and emergency powers of municipal health officers and make it easier for hospitals to hire staff during emergencies.
“I think we’re doing very well” overall in preparing for large-scale emergencies, but there are gaps in the state’s readiness, said Sen. Ethan Strimling, D-Portland, the co-chairman of the task force.
“The big problem we might have is putting it all together,” said Republican Rep. Roderick Carr of Lincoln, another member of the task force. “Coordination is a problem that we might have.”
Created by the Legislature in 2005, the task force held public meetings in seven communities across the state to learn about the strengths and weaknesses of emergency planning in Maine. Strimling said the panel unanimously supports all nine recommendations in its interim report. More meetings are planned to review related issues before the task force issues a final report in November.
The interim report includes a long list of recommendations that call for more state and federal funding and better coordination among key state agencies. The report says the state should teach Mainers disaster preparation and take steps to assure that medical resources are adequate to cope with a large-scale emergency.
Strimling and Carr said one of the most important recommendations calls on the state to set aside at least six public-safety radio frequencies as disaster channels.
“There is a serious gap in the ability of first responders to communicate between municipalities and between all levels of government in the case of an emergency,” the report says.
As it is now, if too many agencies use the same frequency simultaneously for too many different things they can oversaturate that channel with radio traffic, making communication difficult.
With designated disaster channels, Portland Fire Chief Fred LaMontagne said, a town that is coping with a chemical leak could use its own frequency for routine business and shift its disaster radio traffic to a separate regional or statewide channel that is being shared by all of the agencies responding to that leak.
“Let’s get them all on the same page and let’s get them squared away,” LaMontagne said. “If we can’t communicate to maximize resources, then we’re going to have failures.”
Art Cleaves, director of the Maine Emergency Management Agency, said plans already are under way to initially set aside three disaster frequencies.
Another key recommendation calls for all new schools to have backup generators, or at least the wiring necessary to accommodate portable generators. Many schools “could have the capacity to function as shelters,” the report says, so new schools should be designed with generators to keep the lights on during a blackout.
One educator who supports that idea is Superintendent Mark Eastman in SAD 17, a western Maine district that includes the 1,200-student Oxford Hills Comprehensive High School. That 260,000-square-foot facility, which has two kitchens and room for people and pets, has housed evacuees in the past, but it has no backup generator. Eastman said a generator is on order for the school, using federal funding.
“It has all of the key things there” to put up large numbers of people and even some animals, Eastman said, “as long as there’s a steady source of power.”
On the fiscal side, the task force wants the Legislature to give the governor the power to transfer up to $3 million from the state’s savings account to a state Disaster Relief Fund that has no money in it right now. Strimling said that could be used to provide “immediate relief” when disaster strikes.
And the task force is asking the Legislature to demand that Congress come up with a new way of distributing federal homeland-security funds, to assure that rural areas are not shortchanged. The panel endorsed a bill filed by U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, to provide what Collins calls “a baseline level of homeland-security funding” for all states, as well as additional money based on “risk and vulnerability to terrorist attacks.”
On another front, the task force wants to give hospitals limited immunity from lawsuits so they can act fast to hire more staff during an emergency, without conducting thorough background checks that can be time-consuming.
Mary Mayhew of the Maine Hospital Association said hospitals would remain liable for quality of care, but they would not be liable for failing to conduct adequate background checks when they are “coping with an emergency declared by the state.”