The Cumberland County Emergency Management Agency held an information session in Casco on March 25, encouraging residents to participate in their local Community Emergency Response Team (CERT).

At the meeting, CCEMA Response Coordinator Brittany O’Neill, who hosted the meeting alongside Brian Cole, Casco’s emergency management director, explained that CERT planned on establishing three response areas for different parts of the county: one in the northwest, which includes most of the Lakes Region and is centered around Casco; one in the northeast, centered around Cumberland; and one in the south, centered around Scarborough.

Information sessions would be held for the other two regions the following week, on April 1 and April 2, respectively.

Aaron Milroy, Deputy Director of the CCEMA, explained that CERT is an all-volunteer community organization that serves as an auxiliary to emergency responders, helping to ease the burden off of them by distributing resources and helping communities organize in the event of disruptions ranging from winter storms to hazardous material releases. The program, he said, originally grew out of earthquake response teams in California, and has largely been used in the Midwest and Southeast for tornado and hurricane responses, respectively.

Cumberland County’s website listed potential functions of CERT during a disaster, which included sheltering, providing updates on the situation, and door-to-door neighbor checks, as well as training exercises and public outreach when there is not an active disaster.

“It’s a volunteer basis to improve the individual, household, and community resilience, to reduce the impacts when disruptions happen in the community,” said Milroy of CERT.

Milroy explained that CCEMA had working relationships with institutions such as the Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office, local public safety departments, and all 28 municipal governments across the county, allowing them to deploy assets as quickly as possible no matter where in the county they are needed. The relationships, he noted, came in the form of training sessions, preparedness exercises and real-world disaster responses, during which they would coordinate with the affected community’s fire department, police and 911 dispatch centers.

Speaking to the Lakes Region Weekly from CCEMA’s headquarters, a Cold War-era bunker in Windham, O’Neill explained more about how the different CERT response areas would work. She said that, while they might end up storing equipment in fire stations and community centers, the teams would most likely not have physical meeting places.

The idea behind dividing the county into regions, she said, was so that volunteers would not have to travel too far, allowing them to prioritize working in the areas closest to them, and making CERT more of a community-based organization.

Milroy explained that the size of the county was also a factor, noting that having localized teams was likely to make volunteers more interested and engaged, as well as strengthening bonds between individual volunteers and individual emergency management directors.

When asked how CERT could fill the gap in the event of a potential dissolution of FEMA, O’Neill, alongside CCEMA Director Michael Durkin, said that the need for volunteers would not go away, and that the most important resource in the case of large-scale disasters was people. CERT, they noted, was already a homegrown organization, identifying the need to have localized responses to disasters.

Durkin also noted that Mainers in particular have had a long history of interest in volunteerism. While the number of local volunteers has been lower since the pandemic, he did say that it has been ticking up in recent years, and encouraged Cumberland County residents to attend their local CERT meetings.

“We can’t handle a large disaster without the efforts of local volunteers,” said Durkin.