When Seconds Count: GETTING EMERGENCY HELP TO YOUR RURAL HOME

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Postal Addressing Can Mean Delays

Postal rural addressing can have a drastic impact on how quickly (or slowly) the ambulance arrives. Rows of mailboxes are common throughout rural counties. They sit on planks, somewhere "close" to driveways wending off into the woods or over hills.

All too often, near this cluster of mailboxes there is only one driveway and one house in sight at the end of it. And so when 9-1-1 dispatchers are given addresses established by rural route mailbox numbers, ambulance crews are frequently left searching for the victim.

If your rural mailbox is at your driveway entrance, place five-inch or larger nighttime-visible numbers on it (or hang them over or under it). Keep greenery trimmed away. If the mailbox isn't at your driveway — even if it's just across the roadway and other houses are visible — put matching numbers at your driveway entrance and, in the event of an emergency, tell the dispatcher where the ambulance driver needs to look for it.

Unnamed, Unnumbered Nightmares

At a dream house he was building on a recently subdivided homestead bordered by evergreen forests, the carpenter fell from the rafters. The landowners were there and called 9-1-1. Not realizing their responsibility to get a rural address for their property, they'd failed to ask the county assessor to assign one. Panicky, they forgot the highway number and county road name, too. "We're the only house on Gray Wolf Lane," they told the dispatcher. That's what they were calling the new private drive they'd recently had bulldozed to their clearing. When dispatch repeated it to the ambulance, the driver replied, "Where the hell is that?!" The chancy search began. The delay was hellish for everyone involved.

Calls to unnamed roads or unnumbered homes can be nightmares for emergency crews and victims. And yet they're all too common in rural areas where addressing is mandated loosely, if at all. According to the federal Advanced Rural Transportation Systems (ARTS), approximately 85% of the road mileage in the United States lies in rural and small urban areas (population less than 50,000). Rural counties don't always have zoning laws requiring that addresses be assigned to new homes on previously unoccupied land. Still fewer rural counties have reporting methods to inform ambulances that a new lane or address number has been created in their district. It's the rare rural ambulance service that has a regularly updated directory.

If you live on an unnamed lane, find out if you can put up your own road sign. Before choosing a name, check with the county zoning and planning office to find out, which ones are already taken. Don't choose a sound-alike name. Pine Lane, Pine Cove, Pine Street, and Pine Drive are easily confused when emergency strikes.

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