Board of Aldermen 03-16-2020 Page 14
Director Kates
Absolutely.
Alderman Dowd
Last Friday | asked Senator Shaheen, this is sort of new and reactionary, the Federal, State and Local
levels and | asked her if somebody was recording lessons learned and see what works and what
doesn’t work and keep a playbook so if it happens again we don’t have to re-invent the wheel. So do
we have somebody locally that is tasked with keeping track of what we are doing, what works, what
doesn’t work, so if does happen again, we will be ahead of it instead of behind it?
Director Kates
Yeah so that’s something that we do not do well as a profession. I’m Sure you see we have disasters
all the time and it seems like if you look at the news, we have the same issues, every single time. To
me, | have a passion for lessons learned and continuous improvement. We actually have a person
that was with us in our Emergency Operation Center today that was keeping a log of some the critical
issues that we were dealing with. One of the things that we do after the event is and this not
uncommon, this is not something that our office only does. If we do after action report, postmortem,
the idea is to take all those lessons learned and document them. The challenge is, that we all fail at, is
to ensure that those lessons learned have corrective actions and that we resolve them as they
progress forward. But then also that our successors are aware of those same issues as well as our
counterparts elsewhere across the country.
One of the things that we’ve been doing is monitoring what is going on in other jurisdictions, we have a
number of colleagues and we are using that to adjust some of our tactics and what things we are doing
as an organization. We are stealing a lot of things from our jurisdictions where we will see something
like a sample press release that they are using and saying, “hmm... actually rather than us wasting
two hours’ worth of our time drafting something new, can we leverage this and adjust it for the City of
Nashua”. So we have been doing it kind of both ways, documenting things that we can share with our
partners here within the City but also our partners outside of the City in the future. But then also taking
information, lessons learned, from other places that are actually in a much worse state than we are in
right now and trying to adapt them before it becomes much worse here in the City.
Alderman O’Brien
Thank you, Director, as you know in my past life, we’ve worked together.
Director Kates
Yeah, we did.
Alderman O’Brien
Nothing as serious as this thankfully. But my time on the job | remember the other one the Bird Flu,
but anyways, | am glad what we are doing, it makes prudent sense, shutting down, limited access to
City Hall, to schools. But | am concerned about our First Responders and that’s the Police and that’s
