Special Board of Aldermen 06-08-2021 Page 6
probably six or so months where we’ve been capturing all of the things that we’ve learned from this incident
and identify what significant changes are needed in order to update this document moving forward. |
wanted to provide kind of a quick overview of some of the key things that we’ve found and what we expect
to make significant changes to in our document. The first one being Virtual Emergency Operations. As |
discussed rather than having our team members meet at the Police Department, instead we used a variety
of interactive tools to allow people to share information and manage this incident virtually. We're going to
incorporate more of that into our plan.
We're also going to further simplify the document. As we found during COVID, many of the things that
were outlined in the documents essentially were thrown out the window by the federal government or by
another agency. So much of the stuff we had to develop sort of on the fly. So those are things that we'll
also look to do is cut out the very specific procedural information that is likely to shift in the middle of an
incident anyway.
We're also going to review the types of capabilities the city is not well suited for. Those are the types of
activities that would look at things that would be better regionalized. Things like sheltering, or large scale
operations that the city wouldn’t really need to do their own process for. That also ties into public health as
well as we look to see what types of capabilities the State would be responsible for in public health versus
the city.
We also found during COVID that our resource management processes that were within our plan were also
not really leveraged. We had kind of a traditional approach where the city departments would reach out to
the emergency operations center to request a resource and then if we didn’t have it internally within the
city, we would make that request to the State, and then the State would make that request to the federal
government. What we found during COVID is everybody was just requesting everything from everybody.
That was not just the City of Nashua thing. That was across the country. IT was because of shortages,
and resources, and the massive amount of involvement that the private sector had in trying to get the right
resources during COVID. So that’s another thing that will be likely shifting in this next update after the one
that we’re discussing now.
The authorities of the State we found during the COVID response that there were a lot of emergency
orders, Executive Orders that were implemented that we really never even expected we’d have to get to but
those are things that we will want to incorporate as well into our document. We'll want to work with Bobbie
and the team over at Public Health to ensure that the integration between Emergency Management and
Public Health is correct as referenced in the plan.
In the final thing that we'll look at is making sure that our continuity of operations planning for the city is sort
of the focus and emphasis of our work moving forward. What we’ve found is that the State really stepped
in as well as the federal government to manage the COVID response making a lot of what our office and
what Public Health did really supplemental and very specialized towards what the city was doing.
However, the State and the federal government didn’t really provide any support in planning for continuity
of operations for our city departments. So we will have to moving forward really emphasize our work to
ensure that everybody from the Fire Department, to Information Technology, to the Library have really
strong abilities to withstand any sort of a crisis that comes our way.
I’d be happy to answer any questions about the 2021 Emergency Operations Plan update and | look
forward to working with you on getting this thing completed.
President Wilshire
Questions? Alderman Dowd.
Alderman Dowd
Yes Justin one thing we talked about about a year ago was as we went through the pandemic developing a
