Special Board of Aldermen 03-23-2021 Page 7
Emergency Response obviously is one of them. If something happens that you respond and try to fix it. But
on the front end, there’s plenty of opportunities with educating the public how to not get themselves in
trouble, how to not cause problems. Engineering — things that we can do to build buildings safer so that
when things do happen they are not as catastrophic. And then Code Enforcement and Economic
Incentives, you can always reach somebody with Economic Incentives and having Codes and building
procedures are absolutely a way that you are going to want to enforce things to keep them going. So with
that in mind, we looked at the Nashua Fire Marshall’s Division. They are primarily charged with the
managing of this. Quite honestly, this Division is challenged in many different ways. They have coverage
gaps within the amount of staffing they have and the hours they can cover. The have a lack of ability to
perform inspections just because they don’t have the staff that is required to deal with the workload that is
on their plate. Staffing in general is a challenge at a Division where people promote in and then promote
out; workload because you are a vibrant city, you are growing and moving forward things are happening
which is a wonderful thing. But for every building that comes in there’s plan reviews and inspections that
happen in each division so all of this good work that’s happening is creating additional work for this already
overburdened area. And then, obviously, funding is a challenge; they need additional staff but that comes
with a price.
At the present time, the Fire Marshall’s Division here in Nashua is staffed by an Administrator, a Fire
Marshall and two Inspectors. So there’s somebody giving administrative support, the Fire Marshall is in
charge and there’s two inspectors who are helping to do investigations. During the year 2019 they did
3,170 inspections and/or investigative activities. The Fire Marshall and the two inspectors conducted an
average of more than 1,000 activities each; 5 per work day. Just consider, you know, an 8 hour work day
for the normal person, everything they do requires significant documentation. So they are not only out there
inspecting, they have to come and write reports and look at codes and look thing up. They are really
working at a very fast pace to try to get as much done as they are actually getting done. In addition to all of
that plan review is required for all fire protection systems, new construction — that is required by the New
Hampshire State Code. And in 2019 there were an additional 1,200 and those had to happen on top of all
the other work that was in that office.
So what does that mean? What that means is when we look at your office right now, it is staffed Monday
through Friday from 7:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. There’s no on-call coverage for after-business hours, so if we
are outside of those hours, there’s nobody assigned or available that can automatically help with those
issues. What happens after hours is that they go look for somebody and about 50% of the time they can
find somebody that can help with those things after hours. The other 50% of the time, whatever the issue
is, complaint, code enforcement, investigation they are not followed up on until the next day because
there’s just nobody there to deal with it. So that’s a gap in coverage that you should be aware of and when
we are looking for places that we can improve, having the ability to hire people, put them on call or make
them otherwise available would really go a long way to providing more consistent coverage to the
community. But with the number of people you have now, they can’t work 24/7, they are already
overwhelmed, we can’t put them in on nights and weekends, we need to find a way to kind of spread that
workload out.
Beyond that, the current staffing does not allow for regular inspections to be completed at your target
hazards. And target hazards are places where there is a significant life safety issues; there’s hazardous
materials, there’s other things that make that something more dangerous than the areas around them;
things like apartment complexes, multi-family dwellings. Ideally you want to do regular inspections, you
want to make sure that those places are safe and if something were to happen that we can mitigate that
with as little risk to life safety as possible. Nashua just does not have the capacity to do that right now
because that office is just not staffed to that ability. Right now, these places are only being inspected if
somebody calls and makes a complaint because that is the best they can do.
So when we look at Community Risk Reduction here in Nashua we have a couple of recommendations.
The first one is that you really need a formal Community Risk Reduction Program and it needs to be
reinstituted in tandem with the Public Educator that was eliminated back in 2006. There are so many
