From staff reports

LEWISTON – Maine won’t send emergency personnel to help hurricane victims unless officials get a specific request, said Lynnette Miller, a spokeswoman for the Maine Emergency Management Agency.

“The needs are going to change as the situation changes,” she said. “I expect we’ll be sending some Maine people down, but we don’t know when and we don’t know what skills will be needed. Not yet, at least.”

Miller said she gets updated e-mail requests for aid hourly from the disaster area. Those requests are being coordinated by a neighboring state and sent to every other state in the union, as part of the Emergency Management Assistance Compact.

Most of the requests so far have been filled by states closer to the disaster area. Maine’s distance from the Gulf of Mexico makes its help unlikely in the early stages.

“But if there is a resource that we have that they need, we’ll send it,” Miller said.

The most recent requests were for wildlife officials trained in water rescues. By Thursday afternoon, the call was going out for workers to staff evacuation facilities and community relations officials to go door-to-door checking on people throughout the disaster area.

CMP waiting, too

Central Maine Power Co. hasn’t received a request for help, nor does it expect to.

“Generally, when an area experiences a severe outage, you start pulling help from areas closest to you and then go in expanding circles outward,” said John Carroll, spokesman for CMP.

He said the Gulf Coast area is likely to ask for help restoring its power from states as far as the mid-Atlantic, but it’s unlikely to go farther north. If CMP did get a request for help, it would be considered, though.

“We do have a sense of reciprocity,” said Carroll, referring to the Ice Storm of 1998, which drew repair crews from as far away as North Carolina. CMP has sent crews to stricken areas as far north as Nova Scotia and as far south as Baltimore in recent years.

“We’ll watch and wait for a specific request, whether it’s personnel or materials,” said Carroll.

BIW sending aid

Bath Iron Works is holding a special collection on Sept. 7 to help its brethren shipbuilders in Mississippi and other victims of Hurricane Katrina.

Workers are encouraged to donate cash in special gate collections that Wednesday. The money will be forwarded to the American Red Cross for relief efforts along the Gulf Coast.

“Any donation you make will help to make a difference in the lives of many fellow shipbuilders and others who literally have nothing left,” read a flier announcing the collection.

It also included the names of seven BIW employees who were living in the Pascagoula, Miss., area while working with crews from Ingalls shipyard, or who were in Mobile, Ala., on BIW business. All were reported safe.

Water experts

Maine’s drinking-water experts have offered to assist hundreds of local utilities on the Gulf Coast in getting back up and running when the time comes.

Steven Levy, executive director of the Maine Rural Water Association, said his staff of nearly 20 trained technicians is standing by.

“It’s so bad right now, it’s too early to do much of anything,” he said.

They can’t help until flooding subsides and power is restored. At that time, drinking water plants would have to be sanitized before starting the long, painstaking process of becoming operational again, he said.

Water on way

Tap water may be scarce along the Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi and Florida coasts, but drinking water is on its way. More than 1 million bottles were loaded into trucks en route to affected areas, said a spokeswoman for Nestle Waters North America Inc. Roughly one-quarter of those supplies came from subsidiary Poland Spring Water Co.

Several trucking companies, including two from Maine, volunteered to pick up the bottles and haul them south, Jane Lazgin said.

The water will be distributed to hurricane victims by American Red Cross and AmeriCare, she said.