Emergency Hide and Seek

In an emergency every second counts so first responders -- like police and fire fighters -- need to be able to find your home the "first" time they look.

by Kesshia Peyton

Published: Tue, October 23, 2007 - 4:06 pm CST Last Updated: Tue, October 23, 2007 - 4:24 pm CST

Emergency crews want standardized addresses on houses and businesses.
Mobile Fire-Rescue says there have been countless times where they had to stop and ask where a house is located because the numbers on the front are either too small or not properly displayed.
Officials say it has become a huge problem and that means responding to an emergency takes longer when they have to guess where a person lives.
"We want all of our customers or citizens to get emergency response in six minutes or less but it's almost impossible to do that if we're still guessing do they have theirs posted on their house or is it on the sidewalk or is it written on a big rock in the front yard or is it hanging some other ornate picture or something out on the yard. So, it's hard to decipher for what we're looking for," said Mobile Fire-Rescue Spokesperson Captain Debbie Bryars.
In 2003 Mobile adopted the International Fire Code which stated that all houses and businesses should have numbers that are plainly visible and are at least four inches high and half-an-inch wide.
It just hasn't been enforced.

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rmseek1234 Says:

Tue, Oct 23, 2007 at 6:05 pm

I agree 100%. I am a home health nurse, and while going to my patients home is not a matter of life and death, it can be difficult or impossible to find where people live. Especially if their phone has been disconnected, or they don’t answer and you need directions. So many homes, especially in the rural areas of the counties, have mailboxes on one side of the road or all at the beginning of the road(as on some dirt roads), and unless the home is marked, the house cannot be found. I have also seen this problem at some apartment complexes where there are multiple units and the letters to designate the building were blown off during Katrina and never replaced. This is a tragedy waiting to happen-just imagine if someone calls 911, lives alone and loses consciousness. The emergency crews would waste valuable time trying to figure out which building is the right one in these complexes, or which house in the case of the mailboxes all on one side of the road or at the beginning of the road.