sunhuntin
15th December 2009, 08:06
Confusion reigns over road names in emergencies
John Maslin | 14th December 2009
The muddle of different names for street or place names is creating problems for the country's emergency services and an effort is being made to tidy things up.
And it could affect a number of addresses in the Wanganui district.
Terralink International, the company that provides physical address and location data to the emergency services, says there are around 70,000 named roads in New Zealand.
The problem is that the official emergency service database, supplied to police, fire and ambulance by Terralink, currently has aliases for 5 per cent of those and aliases for 2 per cent of the two million recorded addresses.
To try to clear things up the company has launched a website called myaddress.co.nz that allows Kiwis to check and confirm that the emergency services have the right details on how to find them.
The idea for the website came after an incident on SH43, between Stratford and Taumarunui. Emergency services were given the tourist name for the road - the Forgotten Highway - causing a major delay before an ambulance got to the scene.
And not just there. In the Kai Iwi beach settlement of Mowhanau, a number of street names were changed about 2001 to avoid confusion with similarly named streets in the city.
Rimu St became Mowhanau Dr and Matai St became Broadview Heights. Both Rimu St and Matai St are streets in Castlecliff.
One Mowhanau resident said when family were building a house there the roof structure was delivered to Rimu St in the city rather than Rimu St at the beach.
Mike Donald, managing director of Terralink, said there could be up to 50,000 more unrecorded aliases and that created major problems in emergency callouts where "minutes matter".
He said people dialling 111 needed to know emergency services had the best possible information they needed to find them.
Mr Donald said emergency services relied on a comprehensive mapping system when responding to 111 calls but often the location data didn't have correct information.
He said although people did not like to think about emergency scenarios, it was vital that they did so.
"Taking a few minutes to check your address could be the best thing you could ever do.
"There are many local names for locations that differ from the official information and having this localised information added to the location database may save precious minutes in response time to an emergency, which could be the difference between saving a life or not," he said.
Mr Donald said people in rural areas also needed to make sure emergency services had their Rapid Rural Number recorded.
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from wanganui chronicle 14 december 2009
John Maslin | 14th December 2009
The muddle of different names for street or place names is creating problems for the country's emergency services and an effort is being made to tidy things up.
And it could affect a number of addresses in the Wanganui district.
Terralink International, the company that provides physical address and location data to the emergency services, says there are around 70,000 named roads in New Zealand.
The problem is that the official emergency service database, supplied to police, fire and ambulance by Terralink, currently has aliases for 5 per cent of those and aliases for 2 per cent of the two million recorded addresses.
To try to clear things up the company has launched a website called myaddress.co.nz that allows Kiwis to check and confirm that the emergency services have the right details on how to find them.
The idea for the website came after an incident on SH43, between Stratford and Taumarunui. Emergency services were given the tourist name for the road - the Forgotten Highway - causing a major delay before an ambulance got to the scene.
And not just there. In the Kai Iwi beach settlement of Mowhanau, a number of street names were changed about 2001 to avoid confusion with similarly named streets in the city.
Rimu St became Mowhanau Dr and Matai St became Broadview Heights. Both Rimu St and Matai St are streets in Castlecliff.
One Mowhanau resident said when family were building a house there the roof structure was delivered to Rimu St in the city rather than Rimu St at the beach.
Mike Donald, managing director of Terralink, said there could be up to 50,000 more unrecorded aliases and that created major problems in emergency callouts where "minutes matter".
He said people dialling 111 needed to know emergency services had the best possible information they needed to find them.
Mr Donald said emergency services relied on a comprehensive mapping system when responding to 111 calls but often the location data didn't have correct information.
He said although people did not like to think about emergency scenarios, it was vital that they did so.
"Taking a few minutes to check your address could be the best thing you could ever do.
"There are many local names for locations that differ from the official information and having this localised information added to the location database may save precious minutes in response time to an emergency, which could be the difference between saving a life or not," he said.
Mr Donald said people in rural areas also needed to make sure emergency services had their Rapid Rural Number recorded.
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from wanganui chronicle 14 december 2009