Resilient Community: Mariaville firefighting cisterns & water source assessment

Firefighting presents unique challenges for rural communities. Many fire departments are entirely made up of volunteers, and hydrants aren’t readily available throughout the countryside to provide water in emergencies. The teams rely on natural sources like lakes, and trucks with holding tanks of water — aptly known as tankers — to take the water where it needs to go.

Mariaville is no stranger to the challenge of rural firefighting. Through multiple grants from the Community Resilience Partnership, the town installed cisterns to improve the effectiveness of their firefighting response and continues to encourage firefighting resilience throughout Hancock County by surveying water sources.

One firefighter’s mission

Like many local officials in small towns, Craig Noble wears many hats. Not only is he a member of the Mariaville selectboard, but he has served for many years on the all-volunteer Mariaville Fire Department.

As a volunteer firefighter, Noble is very aware of water sources, and over the years he has watched them dry up. As a warming climate makes droughts more frequent, finding reliable water sources to fill tankers is a major concern. In Mariaville, droughts like the ones in 2024 and 2026 made it difficult to fill tankers from usually reliable sources like Graham Lake.  

Droughts cause a vicious cycle for firefighting, too. The high-heat, low-humidity conditions contribute to more extreme wildfire seasons and make all fires, even structural fires, more difficult to combat.

Even in the best conditions, firefighting with tankers can be challenging. The tanker needs to be at most 10 feet from the water’s edge, ideally on a launch ramp; it cannot, for example, stop on a bridge and drop the hose into the water. In dry periods, the water level might fall so low that it cannot be reached from a boat ramp or it might be so muddy that that it clogs the tanker’s pumps. Mariaville’s tanker holds 2,500 gallons, which sounds like a lot, but Noble said can empty in a few minutes when fighting a fire. Once filled, the tanker still needs to drive to the fire’s location — no faster than 35 miles per hour in inclement weather.

In researching how other rural towns approached this challenge, Noble learned about cisterns: holding tanks with the capacity for tens of thousands of gallons of water buried underground. The cisterns can be placed where they are easily accessible and closer to areas of potential hazards. Plus, the tanks are resistant to drought and freezing, and lose a negligible amount of water to evaporation

Noble knew the Community Resilience Partnership (CRP) was the way to get the funds to jumpstart the cistern-building project. Before he could apply for funding, though, he had to iron out the details.

Scoping for a cistern

First, the Town of Mariaville picked a site for the cistern near the entrance of Frost Mill Road: a camp road far enough out of the way that it wasn’t easily serviced by existing water sources, but not so far that it wouldn’t be useful. Geology also played a role in siting; the spot doesn’t contain any granite ledge that would increase the cost of excavation.  

Noble determined that, as far as material, a concrete cistern would be the best fit for Mariaville because they are highway rated, meaning tankers can drive over them without damaging them. He contracted with American Concrete.

With the details in place, Noble applied for and was awarded a CRP Round 3 Community Action Grant to install a 14,000-gallon cistern in 2024. He received another Community Action Grant to install a second 30,000-gallon cistern at the fire station in 2025.

“There's no way we could have done it without the assistance of the Community Resilience Partnership,” Noble said.

Noble presented about the project at the 2026 Stronger Communities Summit.

Evaluating fire resilience beyond Mariaville

Neighboring towns reached out to Noble to learn how to get cisterns of their own.

This isn’t the first time his neighbors have called him up for support. The volunteer fire departments in the area operate on mutual aid, whereby they come to assistance for firefighting if needed. The mutual aid agreement applies to all fire departments throughout Hancock County.

After talking with other towns, Noble realized that there was a bigger problem to be solved. The county needed an assessment to see how extreme drought has impacted other water sources, and a centralized resource to look up available water sources in an emergency.

Noble wanted to pursue another CRP grant, but this project was different from the cisterns. He wanted support to make the application as strong as possible, so Noble worked with Janna Richards at the Hancock County Planning Commission (HCPC), one of the CRP’s Regional Resilience Coordinators.

Richards paired Noble with the GIS team at HCPC to provide technical assistance with mapping water sources. The team set Noble up with a program called Survey 123 that can collect data more effectively in the field and digitize that data for the HCPC team to use immediately.  

With HCPC’s support, the project was awarded a Round 6 Community Action Grant to complete the assessment for Mariaville, Waltham, Lamoine, and Ellsworth. This grant was funded through the NOAA CRRC Resilience Maine grant, which was awarded to the State of Maine in 2024.  

“We’re all really excited about it,” Richards said. “Instead of the subject matter experts being outside consultants who are coming in, it’s local community members who are on fire departments who are leading the study.”

When the project is done, Noble wants to input the data into an application called I Am Responding, which connects to the Rescue Communications Center and sends out alerts to local firefighters for mutual aid. Part of HCPC’s supporting role will be to explore if this is feasible.

Noble started the assessments in July 2026 and hopes to finish by May 2027.

Richards said the project is central to building the area’s resilience. There have been several large structure fires in the area over the past few years, including at the Bluenose Inn in Bar Harbor. Wildfires are also becoming more prevalent, with towns like Castine spending multiple days containing fires.

“Imagine just showing up at a place that has historically had enough water to fight a fire, and you can’t get water out of it,” Richards said. “This project provides emergency management planning for the future.”