On a recent afternoon, a small group huddled around tables in the Franklin County Emergency Management operations center in Farmington.
They represented local police, fire and 911 dispatch. Facilitator Sierra Fletcher started things off.
“The purpose of this meeting is to tell you a little bit about this project, the extreme temperature response plan effort that is underway that Franklin County is working on with us,” Fletcher said.
Fletcher is with Nuka Research and Planning Group, a company contracted by the state to help local emergency leaders establish plans to keep people safe from harmful heat and cold.
Heat waves are the deadliest form of extreme weather, killing more people in the U.S. every year than hurricanes, floods or winter storms, according to the National Weather Service.
Extremely dangerous heat is still unusual in Maine. But emergency officials across the state are already planning for a future when they’re responding to temperature spikes as silent natural disasters.
Developing an extreme temperature plan for rural Franklin County means answering questions such as, who is most vulnerable? Where are the heating and cooling centers? Can people get to them? Are hospitals set up to handle patients during weather emergencies?
According to Franklin County emergency manager Amanda Simoneau, serious cold is still the most pressing concern for Mainers.
But there have been times, including a few years ago, when Franklin County needed cooling centers amid a heat wave that stretched on for days.
“It literally was eight days of solid nonstop hot that we are not used to that it took people by surprise,” Simoneau said.
As fossil fuel pollution warms the atmosphere, Maine summers are getting hotter. The number of days over 90 degrees is expected to at least double across parts of Maine by 2050, according to state projections.
“Our population is also really not used to heat, and that is something that concerns us,” said Rebecca Lincoln, an environmental epidemiologist at the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
“We think of ourselves as a cool weather state. We think of the climate as generally cool. We think the nights are going to be nice and cool,” Lincoln added. “We think mostly about the winter and storms and stuff like that. People do not think of heat as a dangerous weather pattern here.”
Maine CDC has been working with emergency managers across the state to develop plans for when heat waves take hold. Lincoln said it is a way for officials and communities to know what resources are available, and how to access them.
More than half of Maine’s counties now either have extreme temperature plans on the books, or are working on one.
Jean Su, director of the Energy Justice Program at the Center for Biological Diversity, a national environmental nonprofit, said disaster relief in the U.S. is based on property damage.
But extreme temperatures operate differently. They mostly hurt people, not buildings, homes and other physical infrastructure.
“Our understanding of how to deal with disasters is not up to date with what the climate emergency demands,” Su said. Last year, the center and other organizations petitioned the Federal Emergency Management Agency to classify heat waves as disasters so states could receive federal support.
Su said planning for extreme temperatures means more than preparing to recover and rebuild after a storm. It takes building infrastructure and enacting policies to help protect people from preventable heat illness and other harms.
“It requires also a far longer-term understanding of how to ensure our communities are safe for the long run as year after year we are still experiencing record heat,” Su said.
In Portland, Maine’s biggest city, officials are getting ready by installing splash pads and planting trees to cool people off.
Sustainability coordinator Troy Moon said the city now requires large new buildings to have roofs that reflect, instead of absorb, heat.
“The ambient air temperature in Portland can be 10 degrees higher than it is outside in a more rural place with lots of trees, which is why we’re really trying to enact policies to reduce those urban heat island impacts,” Moon said.
In Farmington, emergency officials laid out their vulnerabilities.
Communication is a challenge — some people don’t have high-speed internet or reliable phone service. There’s not enough public transportation and sick people sometimes avoid the hospital if they can’t afford it.
But the county has some assets — nonprofits and churches that regularly offer aid and familiarity dealing with regular storms, including intense flooding in 2023.
Simoneau said she’s encouraged by the meeting even if confronting dangerous heat waves seems years away.
“All of these preparedness efforts I think start at ground zero,” Simoneau said. “So I think if we start planning for the more minimal things, it will evolve into being prepared for the more large scape incidents that happen.”
This story appears through a media partnership with Maine Public.
