CARIBOU, Maine — The Aroostook County Emergency Management agency has been reaching out to County communities and introducing them to the recently developed EMA booklet, full of information needed in case of an emergency.
Darren Woods, director of Aroostook County Emergency Management, said every community needs to have an emergency operations plan, but those plans can be very cumbersome, and when something happens local directors don’t want to look through a 700-page document when they don’t have time, but with the EMA’s new booklet, at a glance, directors have the contact information they need.
“We looked at how we can help our local directors and one of the things they’re always concerned with is ‘what is my job if something happens?’ They worry about emergencies so we created this booklet,” Woods said.
The booklet contains templates with local emergency numbers on one side and on the other local directors have access to incident cards related to their emergency. In case of a flood all a director would have to do is open the booklet and find the duties that are asked of them and could be asked of them during that particular incident.
“We’re trying to do more training and awareness for those small communities that have one local director and maybe they don’t have any other infrastructure, they may not have a fire department or police department to turn to.
“It gives them a heads up and they can look through and say okay if this were to happen and if my town was to get a flood these are the things that would be my responsibility — ‘do I have everything I need?’ And if they don’t, they reach back to us and say I need some training, and we can help them get that,” Woods said.
The response from local directors has been positive, “the support from the small communities has been phenomenal, we’re reaching towns we haven’t talked with in years: Glenwood Plantation, Weston, Sherman, Winterville, we’re getting back and forth communication with places that we were sending information to before, but they were apprehensive to ask questions.
“We tried to simplify their tasks, simplify their jobs, take that pressure off so there’s a basic idea of what they need to know, and now we can have an open dialog on what they need so we’re actually able to help them better,” Woods said.
The idea for the booklet came out of a weekly meeting Woods has along with Deputy Director Jesse Belanger and Planning Associate Joyce Findlen. They meet and look at the county infrastructure as well as potential hazards and what they need to do to prepare.
“Joyce Findlen is our planner here and she worked really hard on this. Her and I kicked ideas back and forth, but she really did the majority of the work for this plan,” Woods said.
The booklet was made possible by a planning grant, which paid for development of the booklets as well as Joyce’s time.
“We’ve talked about posting the template on our website which we haven’t done yet, but the pad is designed with pockets so if there’s a change, the old information can be easily swapped out with the new information.
“What we’re really hoping for is to increase awareness on the fact that we need to be better prepared in all of our communities,” Woods said.
According to Woods the booklet has been so well received he brought a copy with him to Augusta and displayed it during the monthly county directors meeting and shared it with Maine Emergency Management and as a result he’s received a number of requests from other towns and counties asking if they can use their template for the booklet.
