Special Board of Aldermen 03-23-2021 Page 5
This is a quick map just showing you where incidents occur. So we took the incident locations, you are
seeing a scale so dark green there was only 1 call within that 10 acre hexagon; red there are more than
250 calls. So you can see that in this downtown area is where the majority of your calls occur. But in
addition to that, at the bottom right to the east of Station 3, there’s quite a bit of call activity on the other
side of the interstate as well as on the northside of the airport, there are pockets there were incident activity
is greater than the surrounding areas. This is a hot spot map, it’s just a different way of looking at the same
information and it is showing that the majority for call concentration is happening downtown in-between
stations 1, 2 and 4. And so this is what you would want to see that your stations are centered around
where your activity is located so that way you can get your firefighters to the scene.
This is an estimates 4 and 8 minute travel time, NFPA 1710 is the industry standard for career fire
department performance. So this is measuring or a model of how Nashua compared to that. So as you can
see it is about maybe not quite 50% yellow and then the rest green. There are a few areas in the City of
Nashua where travel times would be in excess of 8 minutes but they are either at the northwest or the
southwest portions of the City.
This is part of ISO, the Insurance Services Organization, this is a different way to measure the same thing,
but this is grabbing road miles within 1 % miles of your fire stations and comparing that to the overall road
base. And so with your current deployment, you are at about 50% coverage and they are trying to estimate
that same format of travel time.
This is an overview of your effective response force so you know a lot of times with fires, we might probably
only need one engine or maybe two engines to pump water, the rest of it we need people. For a normal
fire, around 17 to 18 to be able to conduct all the different tasks and operations that are going on
simultaneously. And so in this, your dark colored area are the areas where you are getting between 20 and
into 30 fire fighters to the scene, your very light areas you get 4 to 7 there within an 8 minute response. So
while it’s better to be able to get someone there than not at all, there are some areas particularly in the
southwest part of the City where coverage is pretty light as far as the number of fire fighters you can get
there.
Lastly, | am going to cover some of the Department’s performance and this is, again, NFPA 1710, in New
Hampshire when you call 911 all the calls go to the State Processing point to be then disseminated back to
the cities. And so what | am going to show you would be sort of going through the data is the impact that
that has on your performance. So this is the New Hampshire Emergency Communications Center. This is
how long it takes them to process calls. The Industry Standard is 60 seconds for fire and EMS processing
and overall at the State they are at 3 minutes, 11 seconds at the 90" percentile. So the reason we are
using percentiles and not averages; averages are subject to outliers and can really sway one direction or
another with a few outliers. The percentile performance is we are lining it up from the smallest to the
largest times and then taking 90% of that. So they will perform at 3 minutes, 11 seconds for 90% of the
calls and better and then the other 10% is going to be in excess of 3 minutes and 11 seconds.
Nashua, once they receive the call is processing the call within 1 minute and 3 seconds overall and so the
NFPA 1710 calls for 60 seconds, 12 21 which is the one that’s referenced from that is 64 seconds; so really
once the City gets this information, they are doing an outstanding job. But we’ve got to keep in mind for the
callers experiencing this, probably about 4 minutes has elapsed before that first unit is ever notified. Here is
our total call processing time; 3 minutes and 32 seconds from the time it goes to New Hampshire until the
time that Nashua is able to dispatch it. And then the next metric we are looking at is turnout time, this is we
have received the notification, and how long does it take for the firefighters to get into the unit and begin to
actually respond. So the standard is 60 seconds for EMS, 80 seconds for Fire and Special Operations. So
at 3 minutes and 13 seconds, there is some good improvement that could be done. Anecdotally if you
travel across the country, the fastest Departments we see are at about a minute and a half so really at 2 13
it is not that bad but it could be improved upon. And it’s not just the Fire Fighters being slow getting to the
vehicles, things like station design, the way the apparatus is staffed and a couple of other factors can effect
these turn out times.
