Richard Gleeson
Northern News Services
Yellowknife (Jun 29/01) - Ingraham Trail residents never feel further from the city than when they are waiting for emergency help, when seconds pass like minutes and minutes like hours.
A house numbering system to be implemented by the end of the fall will allow emergency personnel to more reliably identify homes on the trail.
"The whole idea of this is to speed up emergency response, which is fire trucks, police vehicles or ambulances," said Eric Bussey, director of the territorial emergency services division.
A system introduced a year ago provided locations of residences according to the names of occupants using newly-revised maps of clusters of homes along the 69-kilometre road. But that system falls down when homes change hands.
"For fires its not so hard (to locate the blaze), you just look for the smoke column," said deputy fire chief Mike Lowing.
"It's a different situation where ambulance calls are concerned."
Though it was not a factor, a fire last weekend was a case in point, Lowing said. The person who called from a nearby cabin to notify firefighters of the blaze was a newcomer whose name was not in the system.
Though they showed some reluctance to the scheme, the Ingraham Trail Landholders Association residents elected at their annual general meeting Monday to adopt the numbering system.
"They're going to assign a number that corresponds to entries in a computer-based registry," said association president David Wind. Metal plates displaying the identification numbers will be affixed to each house and, for those not visible from access roads, to the end of driveways leading to them.
Ingraham Trail residents and city residents are on a user-pay system.
All people are billed for ambulance calls. Firefighting services apart from extinguishing the fire are also billed.
This year the city projects it will collect $425,000 for ambulance and fire calls, $406,000 of that for ambulance calls. Total cost of providing the services will be $1.9 million.
