Special Board of Aldermen 03-23-2021 Page 8
opportunities to help people prevent things from happening, somebody needs to be assigned to that
function and back in 2006 and before, you had somebody that was charged with that responsibility but
budget constraints made that position go away and that position just never got picked up anywhere else.
So right now, there’s not an established Fire Prevention or Community Risk Reduction Program in place.
The Firefighters do the best they can day to day, if something comes up they try to deal with it. The Fire
Marshall gets a request for something they'll do it, but there’s not any proactive plan that says, “Look, these
are the risks in Nashua and these are the ways that we are going to try to deal with that”.
As we went through the process, we identified some areas that were just blatant to us that are a fantastic
opportunity for Community Risk Reduction. The first one is disabilities, wnen we looked at your population
right now, you’ve got 8,922 of your households, which is about 24%, have 1 or more members with a
disability living at that home. And we understand that people with disabilities have more difficulty getting
themselves out of emergency situations and that they are more difficult to protect so the best thing that we
can do is on the front end provide education; be aware of where they are, find out how we can help and
make sure they are aware of how they can help themselves. So that is a fantastic opportunity to create
specific messages and educational programs for disabled people and the people that live with so that they
can be the first people to help those people before the Fire Department arrives.
Another one that is really, kind of came out to us, is that your population has been growing and changing
and it has been doing that for a while but when we stop and look now where you are currently in Nashua,
21.7% of your population speaks a language other than English which is really important to know when you
have got (audio cuts out) to know that almost a quarter of your population doesn’t speak English we should
be creating messaging opportunities in the languages that they do speak so that (audio cuts out) learn
these lessons in their native language. And if we are not doing that, we are missing before we even start
these programs, almost a quarter of your population. So it is important to be sensitive to what is in the
community, who is in the community, what their needs are, and how we can meet them in a way that meets
their needs.
So with that, when we look at industry standards and best practices, NFPA 1730 is what we would look at
and that talks about staffing levels for inspectors and Fire Marshalls. The present staffing level does not
allow for the regular inspections that they recommend and the only way you are going to be able to do that
is to add additional people to that office. | would tell you, you are probably, when we look at the numbers to
use 3: if we could get 1 or 2 in there now it would still be a huge step forward but that’s the kind of thing we
want to plan for. We all understand that these things require money and that money requires planning;
start small, add 1 a year, build up to it, knowing though that as you are adding people to this process to try
to balance it out, your community is still growing, so not only are you going to be adding people but you
may need to add more people to meet that future need that is still coming forward.
Beyond that, there may be other ways to look at it, ways such as plan review component as part of the
workload in that office. The problem with line firefighters is they promote in, they promote out; some stay
for a while, some don’t want to be there. So there’s a level of change that is going on within that area. A
civilian plans reviewer is somebody who is hired to come in and just perform that function and not have an
opportunity to leave or not promote to the line might give you the opportunity to create stability, somebody
that was consistently looking at all of the new plans coming in making sure they were held to the same
standard and was there for a number of years to create a significant consistent baseline. So that may be
an opportunity where you can remove some of the work from the other Fire Marshalls and inspectors, give
somebody else their job of civilian planning reviewer, create some stability in that office and still be able to
perform more Community Risk Reduction and inspection opportunities.
So the next big area we wanted to hit on was the Facilities within Nashua Fire Rescue. You have 6 fire
stations, plus you have a fire alarm headquarter building and a training facility with the burn building. What
we did is we came through on this process, is we met with the firefighters and spoke with them but we also
visited all the fire stations. And we created a rating system where every building was rated as excellent,
good, fair, or poor. Fair and poor obviously being the areas you should be aware of. A “fair building is one
that is structurally sound but there are some non-structural defects, the interior has got wear and tear, there
