Can you see the street address numbers on your house at night? If not, it may soon be a violation. The proposed change comes due to growing safety concerns.
What ordinance 18-21 proposes is that the city require all homes to be numbered according to the City of Bethel Address Map, which is how a structure is numerically registered with the city, and on a reflective green background sign with bright white lettering for the numbers. The reason? Public safety. Here is Bethel Fire Chief Bill Howell speaking at Tuesday’s Bethel City Council meeting.
“Go ahead and take an anecdotal survey when you leave here today, and drive through Blueberry Subdivision, and imagine that you’re me or one of my team looking for somebody who has just reported that their baby is not breathing,” said Howell.
Howell went on, and city council members listened.
“And so you can imagine that time is of incredible essence. And as you take that drive, just start to notice how many house numbers are missing, or they’re not visible. And so even a house that does have three inch black numbers affixed to a brown home are pretty hard to see in the daytime, much less almost impossible to see at night,” Howell said.
The first responders are beginning to have difficulty finding homes, the chief says. This is partly because of personnel turnover.
Council members were not ready to act. They had a lot of questions and concerns around how these changes would be implemented. Howell recommends implementing them incrementally, but said it’s for the good of the community’s safety overall.
Discussion of the requirement will continue at the next council meeting on September 11.