Recently in Emergency Preparedness Category

MOULTONBORO — With several unpleasant surprises from Mother Nature this year, several town officials urged the board of selectmen to consider instituting the National Incident Management System. As was his practice in other towns, Town Administrator Carter Terenzini reviewed the events and fallout from the July 18 storm event. But in order to be ready for whatever comes next, Terenzini recommended a more formal plan be instituted for the town to deal with it. Though fire, police, and public works departments are prepared, Terenzini said that other town officials needed to move forward in training to be able to handle such situations. “We are substantially behind where we should be on this,” said Terenzini. “We need contingencies for operating plans – if this building went down, we have no formal plan as to how to continue operations.” Building on this, Moultonboro Fire Chief Dave Bengston gave a short presentation on NIMS, and how it would give the town a standard approach to emergency management and response to crises. The plan would train local public officials, EMS, fire, public works, and police in the command system. With the need for responsible and trained officials, Bengston said that those entering the NIMS program would learn resource management and multiagency coordination for a variety of different situations. The intent, he said, is to be able to manage a crisis of any size or complication. “It’s about the chain of command,” said Terenzini. “You learn what each function is and how to flow well.” In order to get the system going, Bengston said that they would have to identify the people to be trained and the level of training they would require. Once trained, he suggested that they conduct a “table-top exercise” to evaluate the system and to correct where needed. “This summer,we’ve dealt with floods, a tornado – though it wasn’t in town, we sent resources out of town to help the affected areas,” said Bengston. “There are winter storms, and man-made disasters. Every day, gas tankers go up and down NH Rt. 25.” Terenzini said there would be some cost involved for training and staff time, and said that he and town staff would work on this and get back to the selectmen. The directive for the institution of NIMS came from President George W. Bush in 2003, to “Federal, State, and local governments to work effectively and efficiently together to prepare for, respond to, and recover from domestic incidents, regardless of cause, size, or complexity.” In preparing for such crisis events, NIMS combines “planning, training, exercises, personnel qualification and certification standards, equipment acquisition and certification standards, and publication management processes and activities.”

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