AUGUSTA, Maine — A day before last week’s wind and rain storm, Allyson Hill, the emergency management director in Oxford County, got a call saying her area was about to be hit hard.
It came from a prescient coordinator at the National Weather Service. Several inches of rain fell across inland areas of Maine and New Hampshire last Monday, sending the Androscoggin River in Rumford above severe flood stage. The storm killed four people in Maine, including two whose car was swept off a bridge into the Swift River between Rumford and Mexico.
The federal agency drives planning decisions but it is now the center of an unlikely conflict between the state’s chief executive and meteorologists. After Gov. Janet Mills criticized the forecasts at a news conference last week, the National Weather Service took the rare step of issuing a Friday response saying the storm was “well forecasted and communicated.”
In response to questions about the state’s response to the Dec. 18 storm, Mills, a Democrat, told reporters Wednesday that the agency did not predict up to 6 inches of rain or winds of up to 70 mph in any Maine community. But it did the day before the storm, issuing maps calling for up to 6 inches of rain in western areas and gusts of up to 70 mph along the coast.
Hill read from her notes ahead of the storm that presaged the events well. Mike Haggett, a forecaster from Kennebunk who publishes analysis on his Pine Tree Weather site, said the governor’s comments “surprised” him.
“It was a well-called event,” Haggett said.
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The alarm bells started the Friday before the storm, when Haggett told his readers to prepare for flooding, wind damage and outages. Early Saturday, the National Weather Service’s Caribou office issued a high wind watch and followed it with a flood watch. The Gray office issued the same two alerts later in the day, and a coastal flood warning came early Sunday.
The Maine Emergency Management Agency prepared staffing plans on Saturday and held a conference call with county emergency managers, utilities and other partnering agencies on Sunday, a spokesperson said. Forecasts worsened throughout the day, with Hill telling her communities at 5 p.m. to expect hundreds of thousands of outages and long restoration times.
By that point, the National Weather Service had said to expect up to 5 inches of rain with the potential for moderate and flash floods. The flooding turned out to be worse than that as the Monday rain melted snow in the mountains, sending water rushing into tributaries for major rivers including the Androscoggin and Kennebec that got to high points on Tuesday.
Mills said little about the storm until Tuesday, when she declared an emergency. Mainers flocked to gas stations and stores with many saying they were caught off guard. The state’s emergency management agency issued no news release ahead of the storm, but a spokesperson said Tuesday that it “prepared for this weather event in the same way we would for any other.”
Mills’ office did not respond to Tuesday questions on the governor’s false characterization of the forecasts, which angered meteorologists across the country who noted on social media that the state had ample time to warn people. In 2014, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo faced similar criticism after saying forecasts on a blizzard were “wrong.”.
“We appreciate our relationship with the National Weather Service, who are strong partners in our storm preparation efforts,” Vanessa Corson, a spokesperson for the Maine Emergency Management Agency, said in a statement. “As always, we will look for opportunities to strengthen communication with them and with Maine people.”
Hill, in Oxford County, noted that this storm came just before Christmas and may have caught people unaware. Since this time last year, she counted four flooding events in western Maine, concluding that people here may need to adjust their expectations to account for floods at different times of the year aside from the normal spring snow melt.
“We’re having a lot of extreme stuff, and I think it’s going to have to go on longer for one year for people, collectively, I mean, for society to go, ‘Things are getting worse,’” she said.