BLOOMINGTON -- An all-star team of community disaster planners huddled Friday to make sure that they'll use the same playbook if the second wave of H1N1 reaches pandemic stage.

"We wanted to get all the community leaders in the same place," said Mike Claver, superintendent of emergency management at State Farm Insurance Cos.

The H1N1 Information Sharing Summit at State Farm's Oakland Avenue Building was attended by about 120 representatives of businesses and agencies, including Illinois State University, BroMenn Regional Medical Center, Country Financial, police and fire departments, schools, media, McLean County Emergency Management Agency, and the McLean, Woodford and Peoria county health departments.

Despite ongoing collaboration, disaster planners decided a summit was a good idea to get more businesses and agencies involved.

"We know it's here," Walt Howe, director of the McLean County Health Department, said of H1N1, formerly called swine flu. Disaster planners are concerned because it's a novel virus that spreads rapidly and affects mostly young, healthy people.

But because reporting H1N1 isn't required unless the patient is hospitalized or seriously ill, the health department doesn't know how many people have the virus in the county, beyond four confirmed cases, Howe said.

In an outbreak, ISU plans to have students do more work online, said Brent Paterson, senior associate vice president for student affairs. Claver said State Farm studied having some of its employees work from home.

But Claver and Paterson have the same concerns: Will there be enough bandwidth to support thousands of people trying to work from home? Will vendors be able to continue to deliver supplies for people who continue to report for work?

Businesses that haven't planned on how they would handle a large percentage of sick employees need to do so, Claver and Howe advised.

Hospitals have plans to handle a sudden surge of patients, said Mark Lareau, BroMenn emergency/disaster preparedness manager.