Special Board of Aldermen 03-23-2021 Page 18
Alderman Harriott-Gathright
Thank you.
President Wilshire
Thank you. Alderman Dowd?
Alderman Dowd
Just real quickly and Chief Rhodes, the City does have two pieces of land earmarked for Fire Stations in
the City. The one issue we had was out on Amherst Street with a lot of commercial buildings is the fire
station that addresses that is the airport fire station, correct me if I’m wrong. If, for any reason, there was an
accident on Amherst Street or Sharon Avenue or there was a train across the tracks, you can’t respond.
You’d have to wait for the station from Amherst Street to get up there which would be a delay. But in the
future we do have a parcel of land.
Fire Chief Rhodes
Horton Road.
Alderman Dowd
Horton Road, thank you, which could be earmarked for at least the single engine truck initially that could
respond immediately. But just thought you might want to address that.
Fire Chief Rhodes
Yes, thank you Alderman Dowd. So when you look at the data and just a point of clarification, all of the
data that Stuart and Mary-Ellen are speaking of was from our fire dispatch and from our City GIS ESRY.
So that is all 100% Nashua data, that is not made up. So you bring up the airport fire station, you know,
back in the day, | don’t know | wasn’t around that long. | haven’t been around that long. But urban legend
tells me they put the fire station there because they didn’t know which road was going to build up — Amherst
Street or Broad Street. So you put it in the middle. Well lo and behold. Amherst Street builds up and now
that fire station is kind of on an island. As you alluded to, Alderman Dowd, yes the station who backs them
up is the Amherst Street Station which also covers the north end of the City and in that section of the City
where they showed the population density is. So that creates response time lags to get out there.
The other part, and all of this data is in this report, you can see the travel times, the southwest part of the
City is in the same boat. Right now, it is covered by Engine 6 at the Conant Road Station. But if Engine 6 is
busy, the next vehicle to come is from the Lake Street Fire station or the Spit Brook Road Fire Station. So
now we are getting into those protracted response times of 8 to 10 minutes to get out there. As Stuart
alluded to, this is all data driven. And they are throwing ideas out there for us. But one of the things we
have been talking about for a while is what do we do with the airport fire station and where could we put
that because we can’t just move that airport fire station, although | know it’s your Ward, we can’t move it out
there to Ward 2 and then leave everybody on Ward 1 without fire protection and EMS coverage. So that’s
kind of the dilemma we are in but | think the data that is in this report bears out a lot of answers for us going
forward.
President Wilshire
Are you all set Alderman Dowd?
