Imagine it’s the big one — a major hurricane is heading for Boothbay Harbor, and it will affect all of Lincoln County and much of the Midcoast. It’s mid-August, the kids aren’t back in school yet, but they might be at the campgrounds; and tourists occupy cottages, cabins, tents and RVs up and down the coast. There are a lot of folks here from overseas to work, and there’s no time to get them home, either. Every single boat is in the water.

The weather forecast calls for deteriorating conditions, high winds, rain, and up to six feet of storm surge.

If you’re a town official or a first responder, what do you do? Where do you put the people? How do you evacuate kids from the summer camps and seniors from the nursing homes as they lose power? Where do you send them? How do you protect your own first responders from downed tree limbs and electric wires? How do you stay in communication with everyone if the towers go down or lose power?

On Thursday, Aug. 18, people from Damariscotta, Newcastle, Bristol, South Bristol, Bremen and Nobleboro got together at the fire station in Damariscotta to hash out some of the worst case scenarios that might face the communities in the event of a category one storm. A storm higher than category one has never hit the Midcoast, according to the National Weather Service, but Irene was a category one storm that lost steam as it headed inland, downgraded to a tropical storm, and still managed to decimate Vermont, causing more than $700 million in damage to roads and bridges alone, including the loss of several historic covered bridges.

Maine dodged that bullet, but Tod Hartung, Lincoln County Emergency Management Director, said the region has to be prepared. “There will be storms hitting the Midcoast,” Hartung told the crowd. “The question is where, and when.”

Hartung is preparing now for emergency shelters to which people can be evacuated. A shelter is different from a warming or cooling center in that it must have cooking facilities and a place to put people for the night, including cots or mats. Showers are vital if the emergency drags on over a period of days. Lincoln County Emergency Management Agency is obtaining generators for these shelters, which will be located at area schools, churches, community centers, and other sites.

But during the emergency, other things may go wrong. Trees fall and power lines go down. Generators put power into lines that the fire department thinks are dead. Roads wash out, preventing first responders from getting to stranded people. Which bridges are likely to fail? What can first responders do if the bridges do go down? How can they let people know and keep them off the road?

As the exercise goes on, new additions to the hurricane scenario are added. Where do you take a small family and their dog? What do you do if you have to evacuate a group home for the mentally disabled? What do you do to make sure your own people are getting enough rest to continue functioning? Where do you get gas for your own generators?

As the storm ends, how do the towns calculate damages? Where can people who have lost everything go for help? How can the towns use the media to communicate with civilians in real time?

The participants in the exercise may not have had all the answers, but now they know what they don’t know yet.

Hurricane Tod was an exercise, but there are another two and a half months of hurricane season, and three storms are forming right now in the Atlantic Ocean. Stay tuned.