Special Board of Aldermen 03-23-2021 Page 6
Next is travel time so this is from the time they get in the apparatus and begin responding until they get on
scene. Overall it is 4 minutes and 48 seconds, the standard calls for 4 minutes, so | mean overall this is
very good performance, you know, among the best we see. So | think this is a difficult measure to improve
upon because you can only get there just so fast but what it does show is that your current deployment
model is doing a pretty good job of meeting your demand. If in the future we begin to see this lag out and
there’s 5 minute travel time or 6 minutes, that would be something, again, to keep track of because what
that is showing you is, is there’s probably not enough units to service those calls or that the place where
they are occurring there’s not a station close enough to service that demand.
Here is a graphic of showing what your travel times look like overall just for a visual. So most of your
incident demand is happening downtown and downtown you have very good travel time where we are
seeing problems is between stations 3 and 4 down in the southeast and then north above the airport and
then along the western border towards the south where travel times are beginning to reg out, mostly due to
the location of the stations and the amount of travel they are doing to get there. Here’s response time
performance, I'll quickly breeze through a couple of these, this is turnout and travel. So 6 minutes, 47
seconds, again that’s really pretty good performance. Total response times, this is just for Nashua so when
you call 911 90% of the time or better, Nashua unit is going to arrive in 7 minutes and 15 seconds from the
time that the Nashua dispatch center receives the call. When you factor in the state piece now we are at 9
minutes, 45 seconds. And so for folks to wait 10 minutes or more for the first unit to arrive shouldn’t be a
surprise because we are picking up around 3 minutes just before Nashua ever has the opportunity to do
anything with the call to begin with. And so with that, I’ll go ahead and turn it over to Mary-Ellen so she can
present the summaries of the plan findings and cover the rest of the report. Mary-Ellen?
Ms. Harper
Thank you, Stuart. Good evening. | am going to try to move through this; it is a 175 page Master Plan, |
want to be respectful of your time; | am going to hit the major points but certainly would be happy to take
any questions about anything in the report when we are done. The first thing that | would like to say is that
it was absolutely a pleasure to work with Nashua Fire Rescue. We do these projects all over the country
and the level of engagement and the people that had thoughtful questions and were just willing to be part of
a process for betterment of the system — you guys are second to none. You really have a good group of
people that are doing good work and we would be remiss if we didn’t mention that.
At the end of the day, Nashua is a very proud and very traditional New England Fire Department.
Operationally, you are meeting most of the standards through the Provision of Fire Rescue Services. But as
Stuart said a little while ago, that’s right here and right now and today. You are going to need to monitor
that going forward. You are a growing community, the demand for services is changing, the places people
live and the kind of services they need is changing. You are going to need to monitor that going forward to
make sure that what you have is still adequate because all indications are that at some point in the not-too-
distant future you are going to need to add additional resources in the system just to maintain the service
that you are giving right now.
That said, right now here and today, there are quite a few administrative and support functions that are
woefully understaffed and we are going to spend a little time just showing you what those areas are and
where there is absolutely room for improvement. The other thing I’d like to get on your radar is that the
facilities for the Fire Department are absolutely going to require a financial investment in the very near
future and we will talk about those as well.
So the first thing we want to talk about is Community Risk Reduction. Community Risk Reduction which
include fire prevention but is above and beyond fire prevention. It’s not just fires, it is medical calls and
other types of emergencies, it is really the most vital non-emergency function in the fire service. And the
reason for that is the safest emergency is the one that is prevented. So we can do anything as a community
to help our residents not to get hurt, not to get injured, not to have property damage; that’s what we owe
them. We owe them the opportunity to try to prevent those damages before they happen. And we can do
that in 5 major ways.
