Special Board of Aldermen 06-08-2021 Page 7
play book if and when it ever happens again and | think you had said that that’s part of your plans. | just
want to make sure that that is and the other thing one of the big things that sort of crippled us at the
beginning of the pandemic as | recall our emergency supply of PPE was out of date and basically not good.
| think we talked way back much like you did in the military if you had a revolving supply — if you worked a
thing with the hospitals and Public Health to supply them with PPE, you keep a major supply here
somewhere in Nashua for emergencies but you give them on a regular basis you supply it them and then
replace it so you always have a viable supply of equipment on emergency basis. So you basically set up a
supply center to the degree we need for the city. While | would work with the State, | wouldn’t rely on them
but | think that we need to safeguard our own city. SO working with Bobbie Bagley would be good on that
and seeing what we need based on what happened over the past year how much we need in supply and
how to keep it current. Thanks.
Emergency Management Director Justin Kates
Sure and so regarding the first question about the continuous improvements, that’s sort of what | was
referring to on that last slide. What you saw on that last slide was really the interim findings, the key areas
that we realize needed to shift based on the COVID response and what we’re going to include as part of
the Emergency Operations Plan.
For the second question, that is something | will have to work Bobbie on. The reason for that is the cash of
supplies that the city had for a public health emergency, it’s a public health function. So we need to work
with Bobbie’s team obviously but also she has to work closely with the Department of Health and Human
Services at the State as well as the Health and Human Services at the federal level who provides a lot of
the funding for supplies like that. SO that will be on the radar and we’re going to have to work with her
partners on that.
Alderman Dowd
Okay.
President Wilshire
Any other questions for Director Kates? Alderman Lopez.
Alderman Lopez
Yeah. So can you speak a little bit to the mitigation of avoiding unnecessarily large vulnerable populations?
| Know we have been working on improving our approaches to local crises meaning more like block level if
a building starts to burn that turns multiple houses, who is in charge in making sure that that is
communicated to the houses nearby? Who is in charge of making sure that when there are multiple
families displaced that they’re being tracked, their situations are being address? | see that as valuable
because having worked with the homeless for years — like probably over a decade, two decades now,
Nashua has a large population of people who are more vulnerable to some circumstances than others
whether they’re displaced in terms of housing, with their newly housed, whether they’re lacking financial
means, members of economic minorities. Some people are able to handle something like a city-wide
disaster event with more resilience than others based on economic needs. Other people are more able to
handle it because they are in physical shape and physical condition, or because they have more
connections. So what about preventing the City of Nashua from having an unnecessarily large vulnerable
population that would create a liability in the event of a major catastrophe?
Emergency Management Director Justin Kates
Yeah so there’s a lot to unpack on that one. So I'll only hit a couple of the things. The first item is kind of
the mitigation aspect you had mentioned — trying to identify those vulnerable populations within the
community and identifying ways to try to reduce risk from them being impacted from the start. That’s been
