AUGUSTA – Maine has been allocated nearly $11 million in federal funds for the second year of efforts to prepare the state to handle an attack by bio-terrorists, an effort officials say will take years and millions more to accomplish.

“I like to look on it as money for preparing for a public health emergency,” said Bureau of Health Director, Dr. Dora Mills. “A lot of the planning we are doing, a lot of the capacity we are developing, can be used for dealing with a lot more than just bio-terrorism.”

The public health emergency planning dovetails with other emergency planning done by the Maine Emergency Management Agency, said Director Art Cleaves. He said there has been close collaboration to make sure the funds are used wisely. In addition to the bio-terrorism grant money, MEMA received $20 million last year and will get at least $12 million more this budget year. Most of the money from both grants are passed through to local communities and agencies.

“We meet on a regular basis and work at cooperating,” he said. “There are areas that we fund, there are areas funded under the bio-terrorism grants and there are areas we fund together.”

The biggest single allocation of the first year bio-terrorism grant of $8.6 million was to develop a Health Alert Network that will allow communication, both voice and data, between hospitals and state officials. The first phase of the system is in place, allowing communication by phone, fax, e-mail and pagers.

The next phase of the program will add radio systems to the mix to allow hospitals to communicate in case phone lines and Internet connections do not work.

“Yes, communications is a big issue,” Cleaves said. “We have interoperability issues with the hospital side as well as with local first responders. We still have places where first responders can’t talk with each other, but we are working on it.”

Another key area of cooperation is training and exercises to test the current emergency response plans. Both Cleaves and Mills said there have been many “tabletop” exercises to test procedures developed to handle everything from a terrorist attack using anthrax to all the problems resulting from a natural disaster like a hurricane.

“What we have to do, and have not done, is an exercise where we practice what we do if the phones don’t work,” Cleaves said.

Mills agreed but said such exercises are expensive and time consuming. She said there is no doubt such exercises will be needed to test all of the new programs.

“We have had some real world tests,” she said, “remember the 560 anthrax scare cases we had. Nothing tested positive but we had to treat each incident like it was the real thing.”