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Hmm. In US the people who operate emergency dispatch (police, fire, ambulance) often spend political capital to get changes to street names and addresses that m

Hmm. In US the people who operate emergency dispatch (police, fire, ambulance) often spend political capital to get changes to street names and addresses that might cause them to send service to the wrong house.

sokoloff 9y ago
Years ago, we were weekly renting a house in Ocean Isle Beach, NC. I don't recall the exact number of the address, but let's say it was #164. The house was a duplex, with an east and west side. We were staying in 164 West. That house is on East First Street. One afternoon, our infant son suffered a febrile seizure, stopped breathing, lips turned blue, eyes rolled back, and while my wife administered first aid, I called 911 to summon emergency services to "164 East First St, West". Thankfully, we were able to manage the situation, as the 911 dispatcher thought that I was correcting myself and sent the responding services to 164 West First St. It was more than 15 minutes (which felt like hours) and a return phone call before anyone outside responded to the correct address. I take some responsibility for the communications gap (in retrospect, there was no need to specify "west"; we'd have gone and got them) and everything worked out perfectly fine for my son, but even 5 years later, it's incredibly hard to type this without tearing up. https://goo.gl/maps/VV6Z5nLa4V92 https://goo.gl/maps/VV6Z5nLa4V92
- mindcrime 9y ago
  I take some responsibility for the communications gap (in retrospect, there was no need to specify "west"; we'd have gone and got them) and everything worked out perfectly fine for my son, but even 5 years later, it's incredibly hard to type this without tearing up. Don't beat yourself up too much. Having been a 911 dispatcher before (coincidentally, in Brunswick County, where Ocean Isle Beach is located), I can say that there is a tremendous onus on the dispatcher to verify, double verify, and even triple verify location / address if there is any possible ambiguity. And any BrunsCo dispatcher should know that the local beaches have a lot of those kinds of confusing addresses (Holden Beach has some similar situations, for example). It's also the case that in years past, before cellphones were ubiquitous, most 911 calls came in on land lines which were mostly strictly associated with a specific physical address. Now, with the ubiquity of cellphones, things are both better and worse in some regards. Now you can often get to a phone faster, and in places where there would be no landlines, but the trade-off is that geolocating cell phones is still not perfect. [1] [1]: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2016/12/28/911-centers-struggle-to-find-callers-on-cellphones-and-results-can-be-deadly.html http://www.foxnews.com/us/2016/12/28/911-centers-struggle-to...
  - robk 9y ago
    Oh wow. I've a house there and don't understand why a rural county even needs to bother with directional quadrant addressing. Surely there's not much need to disambiguate in such a rural place.
    - mindcrime 9y ago
      Most of the county at large doesn't do that, it's mostly just on the barrier islands. Most of them split East/West on the streets that parallel the strand (those beaches are all South facing, due to the weird shape of NC). Blame the local town governments for the beach towns, not the county. Generally speaking, disambiguation wasn't a big problem in most of the county... There might be two or three Smith Streets or something in BrunsCo, but if one is in Leland, one is in Shallotte and one is in Southport, there's not going to be any confusion.
      - sokoloff 9y ago
        I don't think there's a problem with the streets being called East/West (and in fact that helps people in their day-to-day usage of the barrier islands). I do have a problem with the houses being called East/West (rather than A and B).
        mindcrime 9y ago
        Right, having "Ocean Boulevard East" and "Ocean Boulevard West" isn't, in and of itself, a problem. But as I recall, the various island towns (Holden Beach, Sunset Beach, OIB, etc.) had quite a few varying issues with confusing addresses, and some involved the interaction of other issues with the "East/West" split. That said, I've been gone from that area for 17+ years so my memory is a little fuzzy on the specifics now.
- jf 9y ago
  I'm glad your son is okay.
- wiredfool 9y ago
  I had a similar experience. 7yr old, Halloween evening, and he's having trouble breathing. The sort of thing that brings medical staff really quickly. We were in semi-rural Washington, 2-10 acre lots, most of the houses set well back on private roads. All the house numbers were on the mailboxes, and all of them on the same side of the road for the postal route. Except -- our house was an even house on the odd side of the road, and a good 300' back on a shared drive. 10-15 minutes later, I see lights through the trees. In a minute, I decide to run out. They were across the road at the vacant holiday rental, I wound up in the ambulance to guide them to the right house. The next year, we ran into the EMT at the county fair, he was pushing for people to sign up for county provided blue house emergency numbers at the turnoff to the house and at the road. And he was telling our story as the inspiration. Also, in that time, the county renumbered our house to the correct side of the street. Helpfully enough, they did it while we were refinancing the house, so the documents were all wrong when we went to sign.
dsfyu404ed 9y ago
Or they dispatch to both as appropriate.
protomyth 9y ago
I’m told that there are proper addresses in the town I grew up in, but none are posted on signs. UPS relies on area knowledge and some vague conventions (e.g. #311 behind the school). USPS doesn’t deliver since they only have post office boxes.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
rspeer 9y ago
An address I used to live at was in an unincorporated area that the county had put basically zero effort into giving addresses. The street had a sensible name that everyone who lived nearby called it. Let's suppose it's "Thataway Rd" (I am anonymizing all components of this address). But that name wasn't in the USPS database. They called it something like "CC04". The house at the end of the road was number 50. The road was long and had an increasing number of houses built on it, which used all the numbers up to 48, and then the houses after that became 48B, 48C, 48D, ... 48Q, 48R, 48S... So if you made the address by following the house number with the street name, the address would have been 48R CC04. Which nobody would recognize as an address. The post office suggested "CC04 Box 48R", which if you filled it into a Web form, would trigger special handling for PO boxes. On top of that, Google had the ordering of the house numbers backwards, so Google Maps would send people to the wrong end of the long street. Clearly nobody was happy with this, but I credit the emergency dispatchers with finally pushing through to give everybody a reasonable address based on what they already called the street. Through their effort I finally lived at 14 Thataway Rd instead of 48R CC04.
oasisbob 9y ago
Indeed! And in a lot of the rural west, there are places where visible signage is driven by the fire department, eg: http://bendruralfire.com/Content/Details/5 http://bendruralfire.com/Content/Details/5

sokoloff 9y ago

Years ago, we were weekly renting a house in Ocean Isle Beach, NC. I don't recall the exact number of the address, but let's say it was #164. The house was a duplex, with an east and west side. We were staying in 164 West. That house is on East First Street. One afternoon, our infant son suffered a febrile seizure, stopped breathing, lips turned blue, eyes rolled back, and while my wife administered first aid, I called 911 to summon emergency services to "164 East First St, West". Thankfully, we were able to manage the situation, as the 911 dispatcher thought that I was correcting myself and sent the responding services to 164 West First St. It was more than 15 minutes (which felt like hours) and a return phone call before anyone outside responded to the correct address. I take some responsibility for the communications gap (in retrospect, there was no need to specify "west"; we'd have gone and got them) and everything worked out perfectly fine for my son, but even 5 years later, it's incredibly hard to type this without tearing up. https://goo.gl/maps/VV6Z5nLa4V92 https://goo.gl/maps/VV6Z5nLa4V92

mindcrime 9y ago
I take some responsibility for the communications gap (in retrospect, there was no need to specify "west"; we'd have gone and got them) and everything worked out perfectly fine for my son, but even 5 years later, it's incredibly hard to type this without tearing up. Don't beat yourself up too much. Having been a 911 dispatcher before (coincidentally, in Brunswick County, where Ocean Isle Beach is located), I can say that there is a tremendous onus on the dispatcher to verify, double verify, and even triple verify location / address if there is any possible ambiguity. And any BrunsCo dispatcher should know that the local beaches have a lot of those kinds of confusing addresses (Holden Beach has some similar situations, for example). It's also the case that in years past, before cellphones were ubiquitous, most 911 calls came in on land lines which were mostly strictly associated with a specific physical address. Now, with the ubiquity of cellphones, things are both better and worse in some regards. Now you can often get to a phone faster, and in places where there would be no landlines, but the trade-off is that geolocating cell phones is still not perfect. [1] [1]: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2016/12/28/911-centers-struggle-to-find-callers-on-cellphones-and-results-can-be-deadly.html http://www.foxnews.com/us/2016/12/28/911-centers-struggle-to...
- robk 9y ago
  Oh wow. I've a house there and don't understand why a rural county even needs to bother with directional quadrant addressing. Surely there's not much need to disambiguate in such a rural place.
  - mindcrime 9y ago
    Most of the county at large doesn't do that, it's mostly just on the barrier islands. Most of them split East/West on the streets that parallel the strand (those beaches are all South facing, due to the weird shape of NC). Blame the local town governments for the beach towns, not the county. Generally speaking, disambiguation wasn't a big problem in most of the county... There might be two or three Smith Streets or something in BrunsCo, but if one is in Leland, one is in Shallotte and one is in Southport, there's not going to be any confusion.
    - sokoloff 9y ago
      I don't think there's a problem with the streets being called East/West (and in fact that helps people in their day-to-day usage of the barrier islands). I do have a problem with the houses being called East/West (rather than A and B).
      - mindcrime 9y ago
        Right, having "Ocean Boulevard East" and "Ocean Boulevard West" isn't, in and of itself, a problem. But as I recall, the various island towns (Holden Beach, Sunset Beach, OIB, etc.) had quite a few varying issues with confusing addresses, and some involved the interaction of other issues with the "East/West" split. That said, I've been gone from that area for 17+ years so my memory is a little fuzzy on the specifics now.
jf 9y ago
I'm glad your son is okay.
wiredfool 9y ago
I had a similar experience. 7yr old, Halloween evening, and he's having trouble breathing. The sort of thing that brings medical staff really quickly. We were in semi-rural Washington, 2-10 acre lots, most of the houses set well back on private roads. All the house numbers were on the mailboxes, and all of them on the same side of the road for the postal route. Except -- our house was an even house on the odd side of the road, and a good 300' back on a shared drive. 10-15 minutes later, I see lights through the trees. In a minute, I decide to run out. They were across the road at the vacant holiday rental, I wound up in the ambulance to guide them to the right house. The next year, we ran into the EMT at the county fair, he was pushing for people to sign up for county provided blue house emergency numbers at the turnoff to the house and at the road. And he was telling our story as the inspiration. Also, in that time, the county renumbered our house to the correct side of the street. Helpfully enough, they did it while we were refinancing the house, so the documents were all wrong when we went to sign.

dsfyu404ed 9y ago

Or they dispatch to both as appropriate.

protomyth 9y ago

I’m told that there are proper addresses in the town I grew up in, but none are posted on signs. UPS relies on area knowledge and some vague conventions (e.g. #311 behind the school). USPS doesn’t deliver since they only have post office boxes.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

rspeer 9y ago

An address I used to live at was in an unincorporated area that the county had put basically zero effort into giving addresses. The street had a sensible name that everyone who lived nearby called it. Let's suppose it's "Thataway Rd" (I am anonymizing all components of this address). But that name wasn't in the USPS database. They called it something like "CC04". The house at the end of the road was number 50. The road was long and had an increasing number of houses built on it, which used all the numbers up to 48, and then the houses after that became 48B, 48C, 48D, ... 48Q, 48R, 48S... So if you made the address by following the house number with the street name, the address would have been 48R CC04. Which nobody would recognize as an address. The post office suggested "CC04 Box 48R", which if you filled it into a Web form, would trigger special handling for PO boxes. On top of that, Google had the ordering of the house numbers backwards, so Google Maps would send people to the wrong end of the long street. Clearly nobody was happy with this, but I credit the emergency dispatchers with finally pushing through to give everybody a reasonable address based on what they already called the street. Through their effort I finally lived at 14 Thataway Rd instead of 48R CC04.

oasisbob 9y ago

Indeed! And in a lot of the rural west, there are places where visible signage is driven by the fire department, eg: http://bendruralfire.com/Content/Details/5 http://bendruralfire.com/Content/Details/5