LEWISTON – Joanne Potvin isn’t happy about being bumped out of her office beneath Lewiston’s Central Fire Station, but she figures she doesn’t have a choice.

Potvin and two staffers from the Androscoggin United Emergency Management Agency will pack up their office and move into the fire station’s training room down the hall for a month, beginning in December.

They’re making room for construction in the station’s main firetruck bay. Lewiston Fire Department is replacing the 22-year-old Ladder One truck with a newer and much heavier model. Fire Chief Paul Leclair said the floor of the truck bay – the EMA command center’s ceiling – needs to be buttressed to handle the added weight.

“We’re certainly not being moved because we want to,” said Potvin, the county’s EMA director. “More than anything, it’s an annoyance because we won’t have access to most of our files or any of the stuff we need. But, we just have to accept it, I guess.”

Potvin and her staff start packing in November. Work is scheduled to begin on Dec. 1 and she hopes to back in her operations center by mid-January.

“I know we can’t stay there,” she said. “There’s no way to do what we do and still stay within safety standards.”

So they’ll move. Potvin said the toughest part will be condensing the 3,000-square-foot operations center into a 12-by-16-foot office.

“My office is about that size, so yes, this will be an adjustment,” she said

EMA is responsible for leading the response to emergencies – from possible terrorist attacks and ice storms to fires or chemical spills on the Maine Turnpike. The center contains banks of telephones, meeting tables, white boards for tracking emergencies and computers and radios connected to a national emergency network. It also contains filing cabinets full of contingency plans for most every conceivable emergency.

They’ll take what they can, run extension phone cables from the office to the station room and turn up the volume on the emergency alert system.

“We should be able to hear it,” she said.

Leclair said his department is doing what it can to make the transition smooth.

“The floor could probably support the weight of the truck now, but we’re not taking any chances,” he said. The new truck should be delivered in March.

The new truck will be slightly longer, with a 105 foot-long reach when its ladder is fully extended. That’s longer than Ladder One, but the new truck weighs considerably more. At about 70,000 pounds, it’s nearly 12,000 pounds heavier than Ladder One.

“They’ve done a lot in the last 20 years concerning handling and the way the truck rides,” Leclair said. The new truck has dual rear axles, better steering and better brakes.