Special Board of Aldermen 06-08-2021 Page 3
scenario when there’s additional coordination that’s necessary between city departments, when there’s
coordination needed between other entities outside of this city whether it be the State, local business, the
nonprofits within the community, and it also talks about how we will engage the rest of the population during
that type of emergency situation as well. Primarily through two areas — first being emergency notifications
— how do we let others know that there’s some sort of an emergency situation but also public information.
How do we keep people informed during an emergency with information as to what they should be doing,
what we want them to do during an emergency, and all of that?
The next time that it covers is coordinating instructions from mutual aid. Mutual aid you might be familiar
with the term from the perspective fire and police. They provide mutual aid on a very routine basis going to
neighboring communities to provide assistance. The same concept applies in emergency management as
well where we may share resources with neighboring communities or other communities may share
resources with us. Primarily it's been really the other way around. We've primarily shared resources with
other communities just because of the amount of equipment, supplies, and staff that we have here in the
city.
The final key area that it goes through is what we call “logistical support”. So for every type of emergency
action that we do whether it be putting out a fire, or opening up a shelter, or calling for an evacuation, each
one of those things requires a substantial amount of logistical support whether it be supplies and
equipment, staffing, communications, feeding, all the things that are necessary for our personnel to be able
to do whatever the action is that we’re asking them to do.
So our office in Nashua it uses a process called “comprehensive emergency management” and this
emergency operations plan that we’re referring to here is it follows this model of comprehensive emergency
management. It originated in 1979 through a report that the National Governor’s Association created which
reorganized a way that our emergency management was done within the country. Prior to that, it had been
historically done as what was called “civil defense” and much more focused towards some sort of an attack
from the USSR at the time and it didn’t really cover the types of hazards that we see primarily today.
Things like flooding and weather related hazards. So comprehensive emergency management focuses on
three areas. The first being all phases of emergency management so as an example you'll see in the chart
on the screen there’s four phases of emergency management — mitigation, preparedness, responsive, and
recovery. Mitigation being the reduction of risk within a community. Things like infrastructure projects,
building codes, things to try and reduce the impacts of emergencies. Preparedness which is getting all of
our city departments but also our citizens, businesses prepared for emergency situations. Then we
consider sort of that break between pre-disaster situations, and post disaster situations, and we move into
the response phase which is what people think about typically when it comes to emergency management.
Getting everybody together, coordinating that emergency response, and trying to save lives and property,
and the environment. Finally long-term recovery which is trying to get the community back up and running
too as best as possible hopefully better than it was before and we're sort of in that phase right now when it
comes to COVID.
The other thing that comprehensive emergency management does is it focuses on something called “all
actors”. So historically emergency management prior to it becoming emergency management was very
much focused on government being the lead. Predominantly the federal government being a lead on
emergency situations. That’s why unfortunately today we have kind of this misperception of whose really
going to come and save the day during an emergency and people think oh well FEMA is just going to show
up and save the day. Well that’s not really the case. All emergencies start locally and there’s a responsibly
of those local communities to have some capabilities to be able to handle whatever the emergency
situation is. So all actors refers to working to engage all levels of government, the nonprofit sector
organizations like your local faith based communities, your Red Cross, Salvation Army, many of the other
social organizations within a community but also businesses both large and small that have capabilities to
provide. We've seen in large scale disasters where local businesses, small downtown businesses can help
get the community back up and running after a crisis. VWe’ve also seen the same for large big box retailers
which provide lots of resources into a jurisdiction during a crisis as well. Those are all the types of folks
that need to be involved in an emergency management plan like this.
