CONCORD, N.H. (AP) – One day, three communities, 5,000 flu vaccinations – that’s the target the state has set for itself in a drill to prepare for a possible outbreak of avian flu.

Although there is no vaccine yet for the avian flu, also known as bird flu, the state will get 5,000 regular flu vaccines this week for distribution at three mass immunization centers Saturday.

Public health workers will try to vaccinate 2,000 people at Parkside Junior High School in Manchester, 2,000 at Portsmouth High School, and 1,000 at Colebrook Elementary School.

It will be the culmination of a weeklong exercise to test the state’s ability to handle anything from food terrorism to a major disease pandemic, said John Stephen, commissioner of Health and Human Services.

“We’re going to test our capacity to vaccinate a large amount of the population within a very short period of time,” Stephen said Monday. “We’ll be able to use lessons learned here for any public health emergency.”

Stephen said he could not disclose many details of the drill because surprise is important to making it realistic, but he said believed it was the first such statewide drill in the nation.

On Thursday, 5,000 doses of flu vaccine will be flown into the state to make sure distribution goes smoothly, he said.

Stephen hopes the media will help get the word out and that plenty of people will show up for flu shots. But are local police prepared for crowd control if too many people come?

“I don’t want to call Manchester or Portsmouth and say, You need to have a lot of law enforcement available in case 15,000 people show up,”‘ Stephen said. “If I tell you today that we’re going to be able to handle every single issue, then what’s the point of having a drill?”

Hospitals in the areas where the vaccine is being distributed also will get calls from state officials asking them to find beds for large numbers of flu patients, a test of their “surge capacity,” he said.

The state also will test the ability of hospitals and local public health and safety officials to identify other places where flu patients could be isolated or quarantined and treated, he said.

The point of the exercise is to identify breakdowns in communication and make sure local agencies and communities also have well-oiled emergency plans, he said.

The state also is coordinating the drill with federal agencies, including the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which could provide laboratory testing in an emergency, he said.

The state has vastly improved communication among public safety and health officials and private health providers since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, but Stephen is confident the drill will expose gaps and help the state fix them.

“We’re going to identify a number of issues that we’re going to have to work on in the next few months,” he said.