PARIS — Communication was the key component at Thursday’s Oxford County Emergency Management Agency severe weather event drill.

“The No. 1 priority for us is communication,” Oxford County Emergency Management Director Scott Parker told a dozen representatives of various county agencies as they sat in the emergency operations center pouring over data and relaying information.

State and county emergency operations centers across the state began a 24-hour drill at 8 a.m. Thursday in what was being described as an ice storm scenario that dealt with power outages, telephone disruptions and loss of Internet services.

Each operational center, such as the one at the Oxford County Emergency Management Agency in the basement of the county courthouse, was fed a series of weather related events which tested their skills at communicating and coordinating response, Parker said.

“This is the first time we’ve ever done one of these in this capacity,” said Parker, who gathered people from 8 a.m. to midnight to practice what would happen in a debilitating ice storm.

About 12 to 14 people manned the emergency operations center in the county courthouse, each with a specific duty from supervising the opening of shelters to getting information out to the public.

Issues such as opening an emergency shelter and updating the public on the situation were some of the goals Parker said he hoped to accomplish in the drill.

The Oxford County EMA routinely holds drills, both tabletop and full-scale exercises, to train for large scale events such as pandemics, terrorism or hazardous waste spills.

Although the local Emergency Management Agency has had a number incidents this year, most have been “near misses,” Parker said, referring to the train derailment in Gilead and the tornado that swept through the region in September.

“We dodged a couple of bullets this year,” he said.

Parker said the EMA has held shelter drills for the past three years as part of a seven-year plan to hold them at each of the seven regional shelters throughout the county.

“We spent the last three years not just talking about it but drilling for it,” said Parker. The industrial warehouse fire in Paris last year “pushed us to capacity,” he said.

In Thursday’s drill, the state emergency management agency sent a controller and evaluator to run the event.

“I’m proud of Oxford County,” Parker said. “We just didn’t sit on the sideline and say I hope it doesn’t happen.”

[email protected]

Oxford County Emergency Management Agency Director Scott Parker gets updates at the emergency operations center from various county representatives during a drill for a severe weather event.