FEMA: State dry, but not a disaster Officials stand by aid application

Although some people have had to make do without water because of drought conditions, things aren’t as bad as they seem in Maine, according to officials from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which earlier this week denied a request from the state for federal disaster assistance.

Gov. Angus King asked for a federal disaster declaration last month so that federal monies would be made available to public entities and individuals who had suffered damages because of the lack of rain. Last year was the driest in the 107 years that records have been kept in the state.

However, FEMA said the state had the resources to deal with the problem.

“The required response is not beyond the combined capabilities of the state and local governments and a major disaster declaration is not warranted,” FEMA Director Joe Allbaugh wrote in a letter to King sent on Tuesday.

State officials said they were disappointed with the news and were considering an appeal.

A spokesman for FEMA, however, said that drought disaster assistance is very restrictive and that the only time the agency provided assistance in such a situation was because there was an imminent threat to human health. That was three years ago when people in the Marshall Islands and Micronesia were suffering from typhoid fever and cholera because of a lack of drinking water.

The problems experienced in Maine – dry wells and public water supplies running short of water – can be taken care of through means other than a disaster declaration, FEMA officials said.

For example, five of the major public water supply assistance projects Maine cited in its application to FEMA involve laying pipelines to new water supplies. These projects are likely to receive assistance from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. In addition, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Utilities Service will likely help with projects undertaken by towns with populations of 10,000 or less.

There is also conflict between state and federal officials as to the scope of the problem in Maine.

A FEMA preliminary damage assessment done by a team of agency officials who visited the state this spring verified that 362 private wells had gone dry between June 2001 and April 9 of this year. Of those, 149 wells remain dry and 213 wells have been replaced.

These numbers fall far short of the 750 wells Maine Emergency Management Agency officials say they know have gone dry. And they pale in comparison to the 17,000 wells the agency estimates have gone dry in the past six months. That number came from a survey the agency did to bolster its FEMA application.

The FEMA letter does not mention these numbers.

That troubles Art Cleaves, the director of MEMA. He denies the state has overplayed the seriousness of the situation.

“If there was an error on our part, we didn’t do enough to demonstrate the need,” he said.

To that end, his agency is reviewing data and will pass it along to Gov. King, who will ultimately make the decision as to whether the state should appeal the FEMA denial.

Without the disaster declaration, a large number of Maine citizens are left without needed assistance, Cleaves lamented. It typically costs between $4,000 and $5,000 to drill a new well.

However, the MEMA survey found that most of the wells that had gone dry were shallow dug wells, not drilled wells. In addition, the majority of people reporting dry wells said they had gone dry more than two years ago, before the current drought began.

Still, state officials feel the state’s case was not given adequate consideration. “We still think we have a strong case for federal assistance,” said King spokesman Tony Sprague.

“Some people want to declare the drought over, but it’s not,” Cleaves said Thursday as a steady rain fell over much of the state.

While the rain and snow that has fallen of late is helpful, it is not enough to make up for the many inches of precipitation the state did not get last year, said Hendricus Lulofs, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Caribou.

“We knew that would be a danger because we get a couple of wet months and people forget we had a lot of dry months,” he said.

In Bangor, the 15 inches that has fallen so far this year is nearly 3 inches above normal. However, some regions of the state had precipitation levels 15 to 20 inches below normal last year, Lulofs cautioned.

“We’re not saying the drought is not over, but the jury is still out,” he said.