Special Board of Aldermen 06-08-2021 Page 8
identified as part of the Hazard Mitigation Plan the city had done two years ago. However I’m going to note
this, many of the recommendations and strategies that were identified in that document to deal with sort of
reduction of vulnerability for populations, there are social programs and infrastructure investments that are
beyond the scope of like my specific office. Things like trying to promote financial literacy within
populations that don’t have savings accounts and can’t withstand some sort of a crisis situation. So all the
things you had mentioned are right on. Those are the things that create emergencies. The storm itself
doesn’t create the emergency, it’s the impact to society that really most concerned about.
Specifically referencing the plan that we’re talking about tonight — the Emergency Operations Plan — there’s
a section in that document which talks about what we call “access and functional needs”. These are
populations that may require some additional accommodations or assistance during a crisis. There’s a
couple of things that we’ve done. Number one, we’ve identified the access and function needs that we’re
concerned about within the city regarding emergency operations; and number two, we’ve looked at areas
within the city that may have higher levels of population that fall within one of the categories of access
functional needs that we would need to consider and things like sheltering, and evacuation, or things like
that. It’s not perfect because we don’t have literal addresses for every single person that meets one of
those kind of those criteria but what we do is we can at least look at | think the census block group level
and say okay well this area maybe in the downtown a scenario with there might be an economic challenge
of a certain area or lack of access to transportation. So we know that our strategies for an evacuation in
that area need to shift differently than we might in another part of the city. So that’s how we deal with the
response phase on how to ensure that vulnerable populations are provided accommodations as needed.
| think the key thing that is essential as part of this plan is that as you had mentioned in most cases it’s
going to be the vulnerable populations that need the assistance and not the rest of the community. We
need to focus our efforts on those populations for any sort of a large scale emergency.
Alderman Lopez
If | could just follow up.
President Wilshire
Alderman Lopez.
Alderman Lopez
This is the seven year anniversary of the fire on West Hollis that took out a pretty significant building and
that impacted this community particularly because it’s so densely populated. An emergency in one part of
the city isn’t necessarily going to be as acute an emergency as it would be having it in another area. For
example if there was a flood — we had a flash flood warning today, if there was a flood in the downtown
area, we probably would see a number of the social services that would be activating in an emergency
compromised themselves like the Soup Kitchen and the Rescue Mission. All those kind of things would be
in the flood zone.
That’s part of it but | was also pointing out as Director Kates acknowledged that there are also large
populations that could themselves become an element of the emergency. He had brought up Hurricane
Katrina. That was characterized by a large number of people who could not be easily evacuated and were
not evacuated until it was somewhat late in the game. Then overcrowding in the evacuation rezone
created a secondary impact. So my comments were necessarily directed towards Director Kates but more
to give him an opportunity to remind the rest of on the Board that caring for the needy in Nashua, focusing
on those in need of things like city welfare, and these nonprofit organizations that support them isn’t just an
act of charity. It is hazard mitigation. It is making sure we’re not too vulnerable to a catastrophe by making
sure that our residents have some sort of capabilities of their own stockpiled independently that they can
use in an emergency. Thank you.
