MONTPELIER, Vt. (AP) – New Hampshire emergency management officials are expressing annoyance at reports that they were involved in a communications breakdown with their Vermont counterparts.

Local officials in Brattleboro said a communications snafu between state emergency offices in Waterbury and in Concord, N.H. was behind flaws in a Dec. 16 disaster drill in which buses were to report to Brattleboro schools to evacuate students.

Not all of the needed buses showed up, leading to the drill being labeled a fiasco.

The drill’s mock emergency was a hazardous material spill. But Brattleboro is within the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant’s emergency evacuation zone, and at a public hearing on the plant the same night as the drill, several speakers said the problems with the drill showed the area was not prepared for a nuclear emergency.

During the drill, local officials in Brattleboro contacted Vermont Emergency Management headquarters in Waterbury, which contacted its New Hampshire counterpart. The New Hampshire Bureau of Emergency Management contacted the Laidlaw transportation company, whose school buses serve Brattleboro and several New Hampshire towns, and the company dispatched buses to respond to the mock emergency at the Brattleboro schools.

Kathryn Doutt, assistant director of the New Hampshire agency, said Friday it was “absolutely inaccurate” to say that any communications breakdown involved her office. “New Hampshire was asked to dispatch buses and we did exactly what we were asked to do.”

Jim Van Dongen, spokesman for the New Hampshire agency, said the fallout from the drill has “been an extremely frustrating thing for me. We’re being made to look like the bad guys in the press in Vermont. And it wasn’t our drill. No good deed goes unpunished.”

The call went from Brattleboro to Waterbury at 9:55 a.m. Vermont Emergency Management didn’t call its New Hampshire counterpart until 10:25, according to a log kept at the New Hampshire agency.

New Hampshire had the buses dispatched by 10:34, Van Dongen said.

Albie Lewis, Vermont’s emergency management director, said Friday that it took as long as it did for Vermont to relay the need for buses to New Hampshire as it did because there was uncertainty about how many buses were needed in Brattleboro.

Lewis said some of the buses took the wrong route from their terminal in Swanzey, N.H., to get to Brattleboro. At 11 a.m., about a half hour after the buses were dispatched, they were called back to run their regular daily routes.

“Nobody in New Hampshire had told anybody in Vermont that those buses needed to be back there,” Lewis said. “The assumption was that they were available for the entire exercise.”

Doutt said the buses were called back because “they had real-world commitments to pick up school children on their regular routes. That, of course, would not happen during a real emergency, where priorities would be very different.”

Doutt and Lewis agreed on at least one point: The drill should not be considered a failure just because it identified some problems. They said that’s what drills are for.