Joanne Potvin, the director of the Androscoggin Unified Emergency Management Agency, is in her 40th year helping police, firefighters, paramedics and hospital workers plan for the worst.

Some of the worst came with a catastrophic flood in 1987. More came with the crippling 1998 ice storm. Potvin told the Sun Journal she’s always trying to keep Androscoggin County prepared, should the worst come again.

Name: Joanne Potvin

Age: 61

Hometown: Lewiston

Single, relationship or married? Single

Children? No

How did you first become aware of the emergency management agency? I became involved when I was in nursing school in 1972. Back then, it was the Bureau of Civil Defense and Public Safety. And they used to come to the community college to do first aid and CPR training for student nurses. I just happened to be talking with Peter Van Gagnon, the bureau’s director. I mentioned how we had taken care of a girl who had fallen out of a tree. Jokingly, Peter said, “You should be on my team someday.”

You joined the agency two years later. What did emergency management mean then? Between the mid-’50s and the mid-’70s, it was all about fallout shelters, the personal bomb shelters and those kinds of things. We did a lot of public education about being prepared, should the worst ever happen.

Then, the Cold War ended. How did the role change? There was a big thrust to do all-hazards planning, not just the simple fallout shelter, self-preparedness training. We began to ask: “What are the hazards we should be planning for? And once we know those hazards, what should we be training the general public to do?” Since the early 1980s, we’ve been working much more with municipalities and officials to help them develop the local emergency operations plans.

In more recent years, particularly since 2001, you’ve also been working on anti-terrorism training and planning. What do you say to the folks who say, “Gee, we’re not Manhattan.”? If it can happen in an empty field in Pennsylvania (where United Flight 93 crashed on Sept. 11) it can happen anywhere. Once the terrorists have the comfort that those of us who live in small towns become lackadaisical, that’s when they’ll see an opportunity to strike. They know the major cities have spent millions and millions and millions and millions of dollars to prepare.

What’s something you prepare for? When we last exercised, we imagined a full breach of the Gulf Island Dam. I don’t think anybody has any idea how many thousands of people we would lose, how many would be injured and how much property we would lose. That would be a very, very, very significant terrorist event.

Is it tough getting groups that put on large events to take these kinds of threats seriously? Although we’re here and they know about us, their response is like, “If we need you, we’ll call you.” But to call us after something happens is, in some cases, kind of a little too late. We’re ready if you want to reach out to us. We’ll still as prepared as we can be.

There have been a pair of large-scale disasters during your tenure. One was the flood of 1987. The other was the ice storm of 1998. When did you know the ice storm was going to be really bad? I was going to my car that first morning and heard five or six trees come down. That’s when I knew it was going to be serious. When I got to the office, all of our phone lines were lit. I called Peter and said, “You’ve got to get down here.” We were here at the Emergency Operations Center for 14 days. We stayed right here.

How bad was the flood? We went almost to 24 feet. We were 11 feet above flood stage. We had a lot of high water. When the water came up, it displaced large flows of ice that ended up in the roadways. We lost of lot of property. New Auburn and Little Canada were both severely flooded. Water was over 4 feet deep on Lincoln Street. We put people up in shelters and helped people reach relatives. We managed to get through that one as well. It was all because of planning and getting the right information out to the public.