It’s always been a bit of an annoyance; the letters in your postal box are addressed as if your house faces one street, but your front door clearly opens to another.
It irritates the postal carrier, too – the numbers are a little hard to see, because they’re small and painted the same green as the front porch – but you don’t think about it too much.
Wilmette firefighter Mike Wessel wants you to think about it a little more. Then he wants you to make one or two small changes that could help protect your house – or even your life.
More Top Picks Rowing Machines
Even if it seems odd to do, Wessel said last month, homeowners need to make sure their actual address is clearly visible.
That means every number in an address should be at least four inches high and half an inch in diameter. Nor should they be camouflaged; if your front porch is green, the numbers in your address should be in clearly contrasting colors.
Far from being arbitrary measurements, those minimum address size requirements actually come from the National Fire Protection Association’s life and safety code, which the Wilmette Fire Department follows.
Nor should addresses be placed in unusual positions; Wessel said lawn plaques can easily be missed, especially in winter, when they can become covered in snow.
Directional misplacement is another problem the department must wrestle with, he said.
“We have a lot of homes in town where the home faces one street but the mailing address is actually on another. The problem is that when we’re called out, we’re called out to the actual mailing address,” he explained. “We don’t want to be trying to search for the right place when there’s an emergency.”
Although the situation is most often a problem for houses that sit on corners, there can be even more noticeable areas of confusion, he said.
For instance, houses that once fronted one street and still carry that street as part of their official mailing address may have undergone significant reorientation during large remodeling projects. Their front doors now face the street that was once at the rear of the property.
Confused? That’s understandable, Wessel agreed, but the department is willing to help homeowners find the best place to put their address.
“We highly encourage residents to actually contact me. I’ll go out to the house and meet with them, to find the best location to put up the address. That could be on the garage or on the side of their house,” he said. “That could be a move or an additional place to put the address.”
Upsizing your address numbers or reevaluating where you put them on your house don’t seem like big changes, but as Wessel pointed out, a missed or incorrectly placed address can actually be a matter of life and death.
“The big thing they always say in the fire service is that every second counts, and it really does. Even if we’re spending just an extra 30 seconds trying to find that house, it could mean 30 seconds less to put out the fire or be the difference between getting a patient to the hospital on time or not on time.”
To learn more about proper address placement or to ask for a consultation, contact Wessel at the Wilmette Fire Department at (847) 251-1101, or by emailing him at [email protected].
Timely signs
Minimum address number height: four inches
Minimum number width: half an inch
Reason: ease of detection by firefighters
Source: National Fire Protection Association life safety code