Emergency Preparedness Manual in the Works for Senior Center

Westwood officials are currently revising a manual that could be used in an emergency situation in which the Westwood Senior Center would need to be utilized as an emergency shelter.

"We are looking at using the Senior Center as a Stage-One shelter," Linda Shea, Director of the Westwood Board of Health, said Thursday. "We're just working on a manual so that people would know how to use the equipment."

Creating the manual was among the topics discussed during a meeting of the Westwood Local Emergency Planning Committee Thursday morning.

The primary emergency shelter in Westwood is currently located at Westwood High School. But the Senior Center, which was used during the winter storm that hit the town on January 11 and 12, could be used in an alternative situation, Shea said.

The reason the Senior Center was used during that storm was to give temporary shelter to residents who may have lost power. It was not offered as an overnight shelter.

"We kind of need to have a manual on how to use the equipment, who the contact people are, just basic stuff," Shea said. "What we were kind of thinking is that it's really not appropriate to sleep there. There aren't full bathrooms, but it would be a good location to gather up to 50 people. We probably wouldn't open the big shelter at the High School unless we had to have people sleep over."

Meanwhile, Shea said she and other officials are currently waiting to see if they will receive a grant they applied for that would help outfit the Carby Street Municipal Building as the town's Emergency Operations Center.

The grant would help fund IT equipment and other items that would make the building more conducive to being able to carry out emergency operations. 

Another issue addressed during Thursday's meeting was the matter of a task force known as Individuals Requiring Additional Assistance.

"It's people who would need additional assistance in the event of an emergency," Shea said.

As part of that, officials are looking at ways to make residents aware on how to self report any additional assistance they might need to the and in the event of an emergency.

Because there may be new residents in town who may not speak English as their primary language, officials collected certain information on this year's Census form to help with that process.

Such information included whether residents or someone living in their homes might have a medical issue that would require additional assistance in an emergency, and also what primary language they spoke in their homes.

"The reason we're collecting it, the language portion, is the (State Department of Public Health) and the (Emergency) Preparedness Bureau have translated a lot of things into other languages," Shea said.

"The second thing, we've always had a self-reporting mechanism," she added. If you called the police, they would know from a technology phone system that you had X-Y-Z, so they're prepared to help you because they know what the issue is."