and then we can go to discussion afterwards i'll turn it over to kevin thanks for sharing i'm sorry for starting that preemptively there i didn't know about the cameras so i'm just going to give the board a general quick overview and turn it over to roger in the department heads to go briefing early this morning with the department heads and roger and we shared everybody shared a lot of things that they've been doing and i was frankly surprised and very pleasantly so to hear a lot of work that i didn't know was going on and i think you'll be pleased to hear a lot of things that perhaps you are not aware of as well and then all the normal things have been happening to get ready for the storm so on generally speaking we're looking at a wind event with some rain and raj will give you that a little more detail hope we're right on the cost on and i don't know what it is we keep being right on the edge of these storms you know we could get clobbered we may escape any heavy damage so we're preparing for the worst of all the preparations have been made in terms of buildings talk to the school superintendent last night she asked for what our thoughts were and terms of  closing school i reflected i found a cure her inclination was to do that i reflected that my thought that was a prudent step because having kids and this it's not so much this morning getting to work it's more getting home this afternoon because the storm is supposed to start really getting going around noon time mid afternoon and peak tonight so we're a lot more concerned about getting people home than we were necessarily get them in here i know a lot of towns closed town halls right from the get go this morning debby made the decision to close school because it's a lot tougher to do mid day closure early close that it is just make the decision so parents can make arrangements i made a decision to keep tom facilities open this morning primarily get the payroll done will be closing at noon sending everybody home all non essential people home library is concurred with that they're going to do the same thing so basically the town government per se will be shut down at noon  emergency department heads will be around it's kind of you know i told people if you live nearby go home if you don't hang around here so everybody will be available we're not going to plan another meeting after this one beca going to be next meeting will be event based if things start to deteriorate then we'll call the staff and we'll meet at the we get the center of the fire of the marines he operations center roger will make that call in consultation with me and i'll immediately call you to let you know that we are in operation so that's kind of the overview and raj will get a few more specifics and then when roger is done we're going to go round robin to the department heads and of course you all know the esteemed inimitable tom confluent from national grid tom is with us yet again and we're very pleased about that because he is without a doubt our favorite guy from national grid so welcome back to raj and it's an anniversary by the way he likes to do this every year on his anniversary absolutely and  kevin said we've been monitoring this storm for over the last five days so it's given us plenty of time to make sure that all of our resources are equipment is ready and that we can handle anything that might be thrown at us as a community it's a slow moving storm it has not hit land yet it's been moving around ten to fifteen miles an hour originally on saturday at the conference call that we had the storm was going to be impacting answer about eight in the  morning and then yesterday they changed it it was going to be around ten o'clock in the morning we'd start seeing some impacts it's twelve hour storm is what we're we're looking at so from ten o'clock to ten o'clock is where we're going to see the majority of the impacts from the storm it's going to probably peak as kevin said somewhere around twelve to three o'clock that's going to be where the peak is our area hasn't really changed all that much in the last three days in regards to what they've been giving us for information we're looking at thirty to thirty mile an hour winds with spikes in around fifty to fifty five mile an hour winds and again as kevin said that that's kind of just that that  is you know what kind of impacts we're going to see from that i do agree with tom kaufman last meaning that they've done a lot of great pruning over the summer so that should help limit the amount of outages that we see but that wind is just right at that point we kind of unpredictable the positive thing is on the rain roger hill and his staff have been prepared preparing for flooding we're looking at one to three inches of rain throughout a seventy two hour period so  that should be manageable the biggest areas that we have to look at is storm drains being plugged by my leaves and roger hill and his staff been working diligently on that to make sure that that's going to be not an issue for us  there was that one point at the beginning of the storm people were hearing that there might be snow or it might be a mixture the temperatures that we're looking at for this storm have been constant they're looking at anywhere from fifty six to sixty degrees so i think that the cold weather component that we were being told that the earlier parts of the storm here are pretty much not not going to be an issue for us and that weather temperature is constant pretty much for the week that leads us into a few other things here we had direct information direct you know conversations with national grid authority to directed the police chief and public works director if they need to get a hold on deputy chief steve bagley's going to be with him at all times so we have that direct ability to get him where we need him if we have any concerns in the community so again as kevin said tom welcome again  in regards to if we have a power outage scenario like last year a lot of questions and it posed to you folks as the board of selectmen along with the department heads in the town manager about sheltering it's very very clear that it all depends on what is the critical need of the community if it's if it ends up being our senior housing again in it's our fragile seniors that we're looking at we would absolutely open up a local shelter here in the community if it's a part of our community that is middle age or younger homeowners will probably will take part in the regional sheltering that the state has been encouraging us to do for years at this point no shelter in our area has been established are open there is six shelters that have been opened by the commonwealth they're all in the coastal communities why is that this is really a coastal impact the that's the biggest part of our state that's going to be impacted by this is the is the coastline and that message has been reaffirmed every time we do a conference call with me emma it's pretty obvious that that's going to be the hardest hit area hit in the state  again and i want to make it clear we're not going to overreact but we're not going to react in regards to shelters and if a decision is made that we're going to alp open up a shelter we will work as a team like we did last year and we will make sure we get the word out to all of the community now last year we did a half decent job i'll call it getting the word out week for one whole year we've registered in the reverse nine one one system has been a big push for the year along with working hand in hand with the patch with fox bill cable with michael and all of our media is on how can we do a better job getting the messages out to the community we have four different ways that we're doing now the first one is reverse nine one one in out that that is a great tool for us to be using we've had more and more people registering for that the next one would be our medias using foxborough cable along with everybody seems to have smartphones now so we're using all of the technologies of foxborough patch facebook and twitter to get the messages out that way we also working with the region on an am radio station that being thirteen twenty again i'll say that i am thirteen twenty is going to be also working with us to get the message out through the radio system and we'll still continue to use the common in the and  the billboards that we have at the comment along with hard copy handouts that will be at the public safety building in the senior center to get the word out i feel we've had five days to really get ourselves ready but i also want to make sure that people understand even though the governor has declared a state of emergency does not mean that we're just going to go and start putting all of this stuff and play because the federal government nor the states going to pay for it just because we declare it doesn't mean we're going to get the funding we still have to meet the thresholds of damage assessment for the county before we as a community can actually look for reimbursement so what i've told the police department the department highway any department that might potentially have over time or have any expenses towards this is to code it as the hurricane sandy so that we can track that money better and working with randy scholars in the finance department to track to track all of our costs but at this point i think we are really ready what we have had plenty of time to get ready and i think we've been communicating our message i want to say one more thing it was just a freak accident that the emergency preparedness handbook came out the way it did that the three presentations that you know in polling clifford myself did at the high school and at the senior center and at the mcguinty room we didn't know th storm was coming but i'm happy we did that i want to commend foxborough cable for putting out that presentation that we did the presentation and they've been broadcasting it all weekend and we've been allowed to get that message out to our residents and i want to give you guys kudos on that because it was your hard work that made that happen thank you chief kevin anything else you want to add you know i think she's done a good job but what i'd like to do is chairman as head of the different department heads give you any detail information that they'd d we won't do any chipping until tomorrow we'll keep the crews on as long as necessary today to make sure that the road stay open doesn't seem to be a big event but it probably did it very thank you i don't know whether the board has any specific questions but let me just tell you while it's nice to be back here in foxboro not under these conditions of course we hope that the work that we've done over the last year is really paid off  one issue that comes up is that union loop that we talked about a lot last year we've actually done a lot of work less over the course of the last year and this weekend we did a lot of patrols both from the air and on foot to make sure that there are no soft spots that that it's going to run you know as we as we think i think the better because of the high winds hopefully all the main lines are clear but expect that we're going to see some branches fall some of the the house services trees that are on private property as well as maybe some of those large trees that might get topped in the wind and walls on one of our phases we have the report of one outage already one of the pu stations so deputy g eight and i are going to go out there and survey it to see what's needed out there but likely it's just a few so we're going to see hopefully just little things like down services fuses that open up which are easy to repair  at least you know we keep our fingers crossed we've got a lot of work trying to figure out how to do storm restoration better so i think it's no secret that we're facing a rather large fine if you're a regulator you want to make sure that  when you're assessing a fine and also the utilities doing a root cause analysis to find out you know what went wrong so i've seen myself in my own job a big overhaul in how we communicate and hopefully it hopefully won't old standing individual and been terrific to work with i'm sure you're aware that we just can't say enough about tom he's fantastic so we love having around and that you've bagley will make sure he gets all the support that he needs to stay on top of things all the preparedness and it certainly shows and i thank you for that just a quick common sense for the listeners that are watching this is something falls in your wire go into your house who do they call do they call national grid on an eight hundred number do they call town hall do they call the fire department of the police just kind of quick common sense direction there is a one eight hundred number that they should call the national grid but also i wouldn't hesitate also place another call to fire police dispatch as well and i'll be sitting up there so they'll be feeding that information to me as well hopefully that will be a burden on public safety but definitely let us know that also what you know public safety know as well validating that you're safe and that you're right your home is safe the other thing is is that we have a lot of folks now in the last year they've gotten generators and we've been stressing through this community that make sure that if you're going to be connecting a generator to your home that it's been installed appropriately so it is not back feeding this system and pop causing any danger to the folks that are working for national grid or to anybody else last year we saw a lot of back feeding into the system we saw also a lot of carbon monoxide emergencies because people had them installed the wrong way so that's one big thing that we need to encourage all of our residents to do is stay away from downed wires and make sure that if you're using a generator that you've had and install the p twelve thirty eight their depth twelve thirty eight so it's five zero eight five four three twelve thirty eight would be the best number thank you tom last year in the heat of the moment we were given out your home number and your cell number right mr chairman we changed our number at h website and actually the home page of fox for us with page you click on the very front it says hurricane ready you just click on then it brings you to our home page with all the fact sheets anything that you need to know about flooding hurricane recovery hurricane ready and they're going to have information about the generator to our handbook is on there too so people are downloading that and calling us and thanking us they're sending us e mails on that so it's been a wealth of information for people but it's a it's a lot of information not only for the residents but also for our food establishment so this information on there too that's about it for me  we did our whole exercise with lessons learned we've been working on those lessons all year long so in the spring i was able to get a grant from the state to hire someone who is called an emergency management outreach worker she's been she's worked throughout the whole spring and through the fall to reach out to try to find the people with critical needs in the community that we could achieve hatfield and my outreach worker and and lieutenant have haskell have kind of dovetailed our list so we know of the people that have chosen to be on this list of that have the most critical needs which would be people that maybe need intellect have an electric powered wheelchair or have some sort of life sustaining a quick meant that they need power for or people who are bed bound and we need help in an evacuation in addition to that we've also  at the senior center had programs where we showed people how to do reverse nine one one we've had offered to help them do that in our computer lab and we've also encouraged people to get their emergency contacts so that if you have a daughter in plymouth she'll get the nine one one call that there is a time what emergency in foxborough that their parent might be experiencing so we've done a lot to try to make the distinction between people with critical needs in people who just need the information through the reverse nine one one also through the grant and the cooperation of all the department heads rogerian pauline and i in the outreach worker we've done these emergency management meetings what you can do to help yourself to shelter in place and with the help of foxborough cable access she said it was on all weekend long so we done these programs in preparation for that and pauline got that wonderful book put together so i think we've done a lot to prepare and i think we've done basically all we can at this point to see what happens with the emergency but the biggest message that i think we want to get to people is neighbors checking on neighbors you know if you are concerned about an elderly person or someone who's disabled or lives near you check on them and just call us if they need vicki said greed neighbors checking on neighbors if someone has left town gone to a relative evacuated got to a motel or whatever leave a sign on the door telling they were i would say do both of those things it really helps the emergency services personnel to know that they don't have to keep banging on a door call a number whatever let somebody know i'm just taking my notebook here so how can you hear a lot about the reverse nine one one and one thing that might come to mind for people is that's great until the phones go down what people need to know is when they register that for that they can read this cell phone so you still have cell phone use is still going to get those reverse nine one one calls from the town and the last thing something i heard in the meeting earlier this morning is that trash pick up is still happening today and tomorrow well you know is is happening until we hear otherwise  after this meeting was already had a chance but we have a lot of time in between about where the location of the shelter is as you know the school did not want to have it borrows again we're going to sorry we had it there because the high school wasn't complete yet it's now complete and that apparently has been the traditional place and it's now got a much beefed up capability over what it used to have with the reconstruction program so if necessary it'll probably be there but we're not really in that mode and not thinking we will of the temperatures what they are not allowed but if necessary it is being worked on the contact called on listen all that is prepared so that we're basically river and ready to go  is running around doing things right now but he asked me to relay to the board that he has or shortly will make the emergency declaration to tom so that the power company can do those home connections if necessary without  needing to get permission and permits and all that and bill also relays he has to be physically present at the scene of any building destruction or damage so he'll be in communication with the dispatch desk raggedy and we've got that really really buttoned up now in about twenty different ways very happy with that so talk about that a little more roger would you please write again as i said earlier there's four ways that we're going to be communicating with everybody the first one will be through the reverse nine one one that is cheap all the area north for county sheriff got along with the reverse nine one wind that dep spin now into district have both of those have been beefed up with phone numbers since last year and we should have a larger amount of folks that we're going to reach with that the second one will be our actual media's working with fox for all cable fox for a patch making sure that messages and information is getting out to the news papers being with frank from foxborough reporter along with using smartphone technology of facebook twitter and that type of information so medias will be used we also have an am radio being thirteen twenty out of the out of pearl that will also be broadcasting information out of foxborough using the am radio station and the last one will be as is vicky brought up neighbors checking our neighbors will be having a hard copies of information being at the common along with hard copies of notices at the public safety building and the senior center in here from if we're using the town hall and it's open in regards to the fire draws my attention last last year at this time water and sewer wasn't talked about too much and i think it's because they were very proactive they got the generators in there were really wasn't a problem with them assuming water and sewer they don't have stations and all that absolutely and have already had winds fuse go off and tom cough and a national grid already on top of it that affected one of our pumps but roger hill and his staff are right in the communications loop and all of the information is being being looked at constantly and the other basic common in the question is looking back last year you know the department heads in the department staff in the selectmen but in addition to that there was a amenas amount of volunteer people showing up to  help throughout whether it's at the shelters or you know going door to door i'm looking out at will be long now i'm probably going to put you on the spot but willie i seen him a lot of the school committee meetings and he's a the liaison a lot for the students in the school you were at the shelters or anything any questions or any concerns that you want to share from the school perspective nothing at all you know that's they'll be ready i did actually talk to lori that has helped organize all our volunteers and she started making some phone calls on friday and during the weekend and again you know we can't do it on our own if it wasn't for the volunteers that we have in this community and everybody pulling together  it would be of a very very difficult for me or anybody to be be able to handle everything but i do believe because we've had five days of really kind of planning for this all our volunteers everybody's a ready to go and i have no doubt my mind if we make the call they'll be there if i don't know william is determined but it's a pleasure to meet you and i got to say my condolences here you got a snow day and you're here with us sorry but banks well  as rod says the beginning the coordination with the volunteer networks has happened the key people have been contacted we've got all the call down lists all prepared updated town hall schools department heads contact data all that's been done so we're basically ready to roll one of the thing and we do have we think the pakistani delegation beginning their visit tomorrow now i'm  yes it was on and off and on and off and as of friday it was on i don't have any information this morning yet whether it is in fact on or not we just don't know who we're assuming it is but so i apologize that we haven't been able to get definitive word to you but it's just you know we don't know either on the assumption that this visit is on i've given frank boat load of information will give it to the other press folks that are  five communities having two or three people visit this would be the furred rotation of pakistanis coming i got a chance to meet some of them the first of the second rotation i think so we've got a nice schedule of events planned assuming it happens basically shadowing different department heads visiting our facilities learning about how we do government bill be it your meeting tomorrow night and watching how elected folks do their business there are key concern believe it or not probably the number one in all their lists is how american politics and our governmental system and our electoral system a very exciting time for them to be here doing the election how we manage to do all this without vast amounts of corruption and dishonesty not that we're completely free of that but by and large we're about ninety eight percent and that's fairly unique in the world several other countries have been able to pull it off too but we really do it well and so they're really fascinated to see how we do government free of you know i'm wholesale corruption which is very much the case in the rest of the world particularly in a little east right now was a lot of turmoil a disruption and governments that are a nebulous form and whatnot so they are i cannot tell you how much they're looking forward to watching the five of you do your business tomorrow night really really interested not here you know i thought yeah but they are also their number one request other than seeing the board meeting their number one this part of the schedule i forget what day it's on wednesday of how an election takes place you know how we do electronic voting and all that and how we keep the integrity in the system and  then he's actually going to give them a quick tour an emphasis on quick because the best of necessity of the polling place next week on they'll be here this week and next week the other thing that they was very high on the list is they want to see us doing the american things you know in our homes in the way we the way we the way we function so anybody who wants to host them for a dinner with you and friends you know and i are having them over next week for dinner at our house and they're fascinated by seeing how we live frankly so tomorrow morning at nine o'clock we hope we have no way to know but we're hoping field will have are opening  reception jim i know it's late notice i've apologized but even if you can be here and assuming we are calling for would we'll have coffee and pastry assuming we have power in the restaurant run up at lafayette house is actually able to do it if not we'll figure something out we're going to have them here and say hello they love the beach if you're available and jack off the lead is very graciously offered to do a presentation on the history of  foxboro following that assuming i have any time at all the work on it i'll be giving them sort of a how is our town government structured so that as they go through things for the next two weeks they'll understand what they're saying and where how it fits in our style of government the way we do it in knowing glenwood town meeting is really very unusual from their point of view it's not like they're model at all so they're fascinated by that tom meetings and  fly and then sunday to get ahead of the storm and waiting word today to find out if they made it so hopefully they're right up the street in a hotel perfect thank you and where this is a public meeting and any more discussion or questions well all the department heads are here so if someone sees a tree down to this call that same number the fired permit which they call highway or actually not involving i would go through the fire department fire we have tom hoffman working with us go right directly through you can handle