The Kenai Peninsula Borough Planning Department offers a program to make house numbers more easily readable for emergency responders.
Brad Nelson with Central Emergency Services said crews know road names and locations but often times house numbers are obscured.
Nelson: “And so we’re having dispatch ask them what kind of cars are your driveway, what color is your house, so we’re getting a bunch of information trying to differentiate one house from another. So with these it’ll actually put the house number in a spot where we can see if because somebody may have numbers on their house but they have a really long driveway with trees and you can’t see their house so this helps alleviate all that.”
The fee for a Uniform Address Sign is $20 and is installed by a borough addressing officer.
Emergency 911 Addressing Officer Carrie Henson said each summer crews delegate two areas to map so that information may be kept up to date for emergency services.
Henson: “So probably in May the people who live in those communities will get notification that we’ll be in the area. What field verification is is we drive around with GPS equipment and get GPS center line data on roads and driveways and we also make sure that the address is assigned to the access road and we post those address signs for people who request them.”
This summer crews will be updating the information for Kalifornsky and Ridgeway but Henson said residents of all portions of the Kenai Peninsula Borough can pay to get a more visible house number sign.
