Special Board of Aldermen 03-23-2021 Page 15
potentially getting additional inspectors, what are your recommendations regarding having other agencies
or other Departments of the City cross trained to support the Fire Department in doing inspections.
Ms. Harper
So it wasn’t specifically a staffing study but as we walk through the process | would tell you that we did not
get complaints about the compensation level. You know there were concerns at the time we were there
because the contract had not been ratified. | think there was an overwhelming feeling that through
contractual bargaining that they were pretty satisfied with the benefits. So | didn’t see that as being an
issue that we see in many places that we go. And when it comes to cross training, there is absolutely an
opportunity to do that to think outside of the box. But you need to be able to manage that. There’s no value
in having people do these inspections if you are not bringing them back into the main system, managing
them, making sure the correct data is getting into the right place and that it is being used widespread. So if
you had the resources and you’ve added somebody to the office that could oversee that program and make
sure it was being done accurately and consistently it would absolutely be one way that you could fix that
situation.
President Wilshire
Chief, did you want to weigh in on this?
Fire Chief Rhodes
Thank you. To Alderman Klee’s point, there’s a lot of these things that by State RSA that we must
investigate, the Fire Marshall’s Office. We must investigate deaths, we must investigate serious injury, we
must investigate carbon monoxide calls. Also, if | may to answer part of Alderman Jette’s question that the
EMS calls, those also encompass motor vehicle accidents which we probably have 5 to 10 of those a day
that we go to. Nashua is a very busy City. Carbon Monoxide calls are in there under hazardous conditions
so there are probably oh my goodness, 50 different codes that we could use in the National Fire Incident
Reporting System but they were broken down into ESCI’s chart into more broader terms.
The whole thing about response time is, so 20 years ago you had 17 minutes to get out of a building.
Today, it is fact, you have about 3 minutes to get out of the building and as witnessed by those poor
individuals last night in New York at that senior living facility. That is something we don’t want to have. We
live in New England, we have a lot of old buildings. Yes we have a lot of retro-fitted buildings. But when
you look at all of the new construction they are putting up in our community now, it is light weight, wood
construction. We are not building the robust ordinary construction which is block and concrete walls. We
are not building timber framed buildings which are our mill buildings along the riverfront that have been
converted to housing units. So it’s looking at the 2% number, it takes a lot of a deeper dive, there’s a lot
more variables that come into play for that.
President Wilshire
Thank you. Alderman Clemons?
Alderman Clemons
Thank you, | appreciate it. So my question is related to | guess response time as well and | noticed that
you kind of, during the presentation you kind of danced around the issue of whether or not we need a new
fire station or not. | guess my question would be does your report say anywhere where in the future we
may need an additional fire station or do you think that with the — or would you recommend rather that we
relocate a couple of them to more strategic locations and that 6 stations could be good for the next, | don’t
know, 20 or 30 years let’s say?
