Mark you driveway and road

[RobertN]

The thread in the Safety forum about burn piles made me think about this. Then, this evening I heard a problem finding a house for an emergency over my fire pager.

A lot of us live in rural areas. Some are down dirt roads, out in the country. Some private roads too...

Please make sure that your property address, and the road leading to your house/property are well marked.

In an emergency, it can be hard enough to find a well marked house or property under the best of conditions. When you are going code-3 to a fire or medical emergency, you're talking to dispatch, looking through map books, getting radio tac channels, navigating, all the while in a large heavy vehicle that is loud to begin with, much less with sirens, horns and lights going. Add to that smokey, rainy, foggy or snow/ice conditions, and it is even harder.

Delay caused by trying to find an address or un marked raod, even by a minute or two, could be disasterous in a major fire, or medical emergency.

Check out you house numbers, and the signage for your road. If it helps save even a minute in and eregency response, it could make a huge difference.

 

[Dusty]

One other thing is to make sure that 911 clearly understands where you are located. There are a lot of mistakes in the 911 address reporting system that have yet to be corrected.
When I was on the department, we got a call from dispatch that just didn't sound right. The address was in the next town. We started to respond, but also suggested that they notify the other town that they also need to respond. No need to have a territorial fight on our hands if they learned about it afterwords. They also responded and we met on the road. Problem was, that the address didn't exist for any home on that street. A follow up call was placed by the homeowner to dispatch asking where we were. Dispatch told them we were on the street, and to go get us. A few moments after they had advised us of the second call a car drives up and a man gets out. He lived on a common driveway that neither of the towns knew of, and he just arbitrarily assigned himself a house number on that street. His home was 1/4 mile down that private driveway. Even the tax collector didn't know of the homes existence and the home was built in the 1920's and always occupied by the same family. Sometimes strange things escape under the radar of the towns, and you don't want to be one of them when disaster happens. In this instance, it was an ambulance call for a non life threating injury. If it had been a structure fire, there is no doubt that we would have lost it.
Dusty

 

[Thomas]

Morning Robert.
Darn good advice...we had sad case where the home owners didn't have any ID numbers on there home or mailbox and there home was painted dark red.
The new EM driver drove slowly down the long street late at night (no street lights) seeing nothing but dark color homes...time was lost and the gentlman pass away.

Now here the kicker....the family try to blame Emeg. Service for not acting fast enough,and today the family yet to put any sort of ID on there mailbox or home.

 

[randy41]

they have an e-911 system here that id's your location (address) to the 911 operator. but you still need to post your number by the road.

 

[DUMBDOG]

We all have the numbers on a post which is out by the road here, do not the process of new construction as my neighbor's house which has been there for five years does not have it yet. The rest were all placed when they implemented the 911 system several years ago. The area now has the ability to locate the origination of cell calls after a lady was bitten by a Bee a couple of years ago, she was allergic and was unable to tell them where she was when she called 911 on her cell phone. At the time they could not locate her based upon the cell phone and she died.

On a lighter note, I did not realize that you could hide your place from the tax collector. That would really be nice.

 

[dmccarty]

I would like to see the "missing" houses tax bill for all of those years. I sure would not want to have to pay it.

When we built our house common sense told me we needed to put up the address numbers. We have a gate and fence across the road so I put two sets of numbers on either side of the gate.

What suprised me is that to get the CO for the house the inspector REQUIRED the numbers be posted. In our county the completely redid the addresses a few years ago. You address is based on the distance from an interestion to the location. I think its in yards/meters. My address is 934 so my driveway is 2802 feet to the nearest intersection. And that sounds about right.

Later,
Dan

 

[scott_vt]

Mornin Robert,
All very good advice !!! For years we have tried to get people to comply with those guidelines and still people either dont care or cant get it through their skull ??? We even had one wealthy person in the community offer to buy the stick on numbers for all the unmarked mailboxes and we still have non compliance ? Sorry I just dont get it

 

[tallyho8]

And it isn't good enough to just properly identify your house. I have my mailbox marked with large 5 inch numbers and I have 8 inch numbers on the front of my house. But many times I find my package delivered to the house next door because they don't have any numbers posted and the delivery man just assumes that it is my house. ALL your neighbors homes MUST be marked too!

 

[JD3520]

I often remind people that they need to have the numbers by the road (on a mailbox) AND on their house. In our area we have some locations where the mailboxes are grouped 5-10+ boxes on a single stand and it may be at the end of the street. We also have streets where the numbers are out of order (174 is followed by 222 followed by 188).
The people I need to remind are usually the same ones who ask why it took so long to respond to a suspicious vehicle that they saw yesterday and just reported today. Yes, this actually happened.
We even have "citizens" on two short streets in a small city that actually exchange their street signs. I am told by other citizens that this is done to confuse and delay emergency responses. It really confuses the newer guys trying to respond because the streets run parrallel and the block numbers are the same. You can guess what kind of neighborhood that is.

 

[Dusty]

I remember back in the 1960's when a Boy Scout Troop painted house numbers on the curb in front of the homes. There were a lot of irate people that didn't want the numbers, but couldn't stop them, since it was city property. They went out at night and painted over the numbers. Those are the same type of people that complain about the fire truck not finding the house quickly enough. Many towns have a long line painted out into the road to show where the fire hydrants are, and the people that own the property that the hydrant is located on, are supposed to shovel out the hydrant after a snow storm. Many don't, and the fire department has to make the rounds and clear the hydrants of snow. One town that I know of also hands a summons to the homeowner when this happens, but most fire departments just grin and bear it..
Dusty