State seeks disaster declaration Drought-related aid unusual for FEMA

BANGOR – In hopes of getting more financial assistance for Mainers who are without water, the state is preparing to ask for a federal emergency disaster declaration because of the continuing drought, state officials told Sen. Olympia Snowe on Monday.

Such a declaration from the Federal Emergency Management Agency would make more federal money available to residents who need to dig new wells or take other steps to ameliorate water shortages. FEMA has never declared an emergency because of a drought. Rather, it typically offers assistance to those who have suffered property damage due to natural disasters such as hurricanes, tornadoes and ice storms.

State and federal officials called together by Snowe on Monday told the Republican there are programs to help farmers and people with extremely low incomes. But no assistance is available to the majority of people who are being affected by what is now the 15th month of drought conditions in Maine.

Art Cleaves, director of the Maine Emergency Management Agency, said his department is seeking to change that by giving a disaster declaration request to Gov. Angus King this week. The governor would then forward the request to the federal government. MEMA has talked about filing such a request for some time, but has delayed any action because it was having a hard time collecting data on the number of people harmed by the drought. The state must show that it has suffered at least $1.4 million in damage to qualify for federal disaster assistance.

MEMA estimates that 2,000 private wells have at some point gone dry because of the drought. Using numbers from well drillers, however, the agency said it knows for certain that 750 wells have gone dry. Without explaining how they arrived at the 2,000 figure, agency officials blame the disparity on the fact that Mainers are stoic and may just wait for the situation to improve.

Officials from FEMA have been in Maine for several weeks assessing the severity of the problem and looking for potential solutions, said Robert Teeri, who works for the agency in Boston.

After Monday’s meeting at the U.S. Department of Agriculture offices in Bangor, Snowe said it was clear that a federal disaster declaration is needed so that assistance can be provided to anyone who has been harmed by the drought. Last year was the driest in the 107 years that records have been kept in Maine.

“A declaration from FEMA is the only way to trigger wide-range assistance,” Snowe said.

She said she would contact the FEMA director to ask that Maine’s request be granted. Snowe said she also would work with members of Congress from other states that are suffering drought conditions so that they could work together.

Although drought conditions exist from Virginia to Maine and in several states to the West, Teeri said he was not aware of any other states applying for a disaster declaration from FEMA.

Cleaves was quick to point out that Maine is the only state to have suffered 15 months of extreme drought conditions, while other states on the East Coast have had a mixture of extreme and severe drought conditions during the same time period.

During the hour-long meeting, officials from state and federal agriculture and rural development departments told Snowe of the severity of the problem. Several said their agencies are close to running out of money for drought-related assistance programs although the fiscal year that started Oct. 1 is not even halfway over.

Dale Holmes, the rural housing program director for Rural Development, a USDA program, said the agency’s Lewiston office has been getting 15 to 20 calls per day from people seeking assistance. To qualify for help from the agency to make improvements or repairs to their water systems, a family’s income must be less than 50 percent of the median household income for the county in which they live. Even then, the assistance is still in the form of a loan. Grants are available for very low-income people who are over 62 years old.

So far, the agency has dug 66 new wells and has 27 more applications pending.

The Farm Service Agency, another USDA program, provides low-interest loans to farmers whose wells have gone dry and also provides cost-sharing assistance to farmers who implement conservation measures.

Still, Snowe said, these programs reach only a fraction of the people who need help. Plus, she said, the problem is likely to get worse as the tourism industry gets into full swing in a few months.

“The breadth of the problem can’t be accommodated with existing resources,” she said.

Michael Aube, state director of Rural Development, said his agency was hearing from schools and nursing homes in rural areas that were seeking assistance to solve water shortage problems. The lack of water was also beginning to hurt businesses such as hydroelectric plants that have been forced to curtail electricity production because of low river flows. Some paper companies also have been forced to buy power because they cannot generate enough from their own hydroelectric facilities, Aube said.

Teeri of FEMA said he didn’t know how quickly his agency would respond to a disaster declaration request from Maine. One reason is that it is difficult to assess the extent of the problem because it isn’t readily apparent like the damage done by a hurricane. In addition, drought conditions are likely to persist for some time to come.

As for assistance, he said, FEMA is now looking into a variety of solutions such as helping to drill new wells, and to build pipelines and storage systems. The agency first will see if needs are being met by other federal departments. If not, FEMA then will try to provide what help is needed, Teeri said.

Both he and Cleaves said they had no idea how much financial assistance Maine would need.