Special Board of Aldermen 03-23-2021 Page 13
Alderwoman Lu
Thank you. Ms. McCutcheon how did you learn to talk so fast.
Ms. Harper
(Inaudible).
Alderwoman Lu
No, it was great. Thank you. That was really incredible it all made sense, so thank you for getting so much
information out in such a short period of time.
Ms. Harper
You're welcome.
President Wilshire
Alderman Jette?
Alderman Jette
Thank you, Madam President. And thank you for that report. Obviously as fast as you talked, you covered
a lot. But it is up to us to all go and look at this report and study it. | tried to read through it before tonight
but | am looking forward to going back and looking at it in more detail. But while you are here, one of the
things that struck me was that chart where you showed, | don’t know if | have the number correctly, it was a
small number, was it 2% of all calls are related to fire? Is that typical of fire departments? Is that typical is
that what we should be expecting or should we look, you know, a lot of those calls are emergency medical
calls. We do have an ambulance service that we are contracted with. Do other Departments handle those
medical calls like we do or do they contract out the medical part and concentrate on the more emergency,
you know, the fire calls and those types of things?
Mr. McCutcheon
Those are good questions. So the answer is typically if you are a Department that runs EMS, that your call
volume for fire-related calls are going to be somewhere in or around 3%. So whether we are looking at
Florida, New Hampshire, New York, Colorado, they are all about the same. The reason for that is the
introduction of Fire Codes. And with the introduction with Fire Codes the buildings that we are building and
are renovating are much less likely to have a fire to begin with and much better suppression detection
capabilities as well. So the number of fires we have are less. With that being said, the only way to get that
accomplished is through strong fire prevention. But for Nashua, that’s one of the areas where you are
really struggling because your prevention folks are really overwhelmed now.
As far as the EMS, the reason for Fire Departments responding to EMS calls is because typically they are
going to be within an area and they can get their faster and they can provide that First Responder tier to
someone to help stabilize them for when the ambulance gets there. So | would be a proponent of
continuing to maintain EMS response to emergencies. One of the first slides | showed where there was a
spike in EMS and it went back down, that’s where the Department expanded the EMS calls they were going
to but then reigned it back in because it was just getting to be a little bit much for what they had going.
But in Departments that run no EMS you are still probably only looking at 12%, give or take a little bit and
that’s simply because with the EMS gone all the other components get more representative. But the
number of fires is simply not what they were 10, 15, 30 years ago. Does that answer your question?
