Helping Others Helps Us
Educating community members can make our jobs easier and keep them safer
By Scott Cook

A few nights ago, my wife woke me up at 2:30 in the morning saying someone was beating at the front door. Pistol in hand, off I go and peek through the peep hole to see four of Hood County’s finest on the porch. I put the pistol on the cabinet and opened the door to a “What’s going on in there?”

“Sleeping.”

“We got a 911 call to [stated address] for [nature of the call].”

“That’s across the street over there.”

“OK, we couldn’t read the numbers on the mailbox. Sorry to bother you.”

“No sweat, ya’ll be careful.”

Now, to paraphrase Bill Cosby, “I told you that, to tell you this.”

I was visiting with my colleague Don who lives out West in a town of 40,000. Don is only in town for a few weeks on temporary assignment, and a bunch of us were discussing the communities we live in. The city Don lives in is now on a code enforcement tear to get all occupancies in the city built to code and with the proper permits. (A bunch of the homes in Don’s neighborhood weren’t built to code and homeowners are now paying the price.)

Don made mention of a neighbor of his who built an add-on to his home that restricted fire department access to that neighbor’s home as well as to the occupancies and property adjacent to his mess.

He also told me that the career fire station is just around the corner from his house, and he sees a fire truck drive down his street from time to time that has to squeeze through the gap the neighbor created. It never stops that he can recall, probably just learning the first-due district.

As a homeowner, my dumb self can go to the hardware store and replace the faded numbers on our mailbox to prevent the kind of confusion that the officers had in finding my house.

But as firefighters, we need to be a little more proactive in ensuring the people we serve are aware there are things they can do to enable us to help them more quickly.

We can go to builders’ association meetings and discuss ways we can work together to make things easier for us and much safer for the occupants. Sprinklers notwithstanding, we can ask for a little bit wider hallways that we can turn a stretcher in or porches that are big enough to put a fan on if the house is built on a pier and beam foundation.

We could develop a pamphlet that lets property owners know the minimum gate dimensions, turning radiuses for driveway thresholds and driveway widths we need for our apparatus.

As we drive our first-due district, we can be perpetually preplanning, noting things like new construction or remodels and taking photos during various stages of construction for use in training.

We could also use these opportunities to bring attention to issues homeowners may not be aware of. While it’s not the fire department’s fault that my numbers were faded, I didn’t notice it. We drive through neighborhoods like this all the time. We could leave the homeowner a note that simply says, “We were in your neighborhood and noticed your house numbers weren’t visible. This would make it difficult for us to find you in the event of an emergency should you need our assistance.” You could even offer to help put the numbers up if needed. Check the smoke detectors while you’re at it.


Or, we can do something similar to what Somervell County, Texas, did. Officials there purchased posts and reflective numbers for every driveway in the county, except those inside the city of Glen Rose. Even the local nuclear power plant has its address prominently displayed. Fire departments could do this for a fundraiser for something like a new thermal imaging camera.

Another idea: Go to open houses of “for sale” homes. Meet the potential buyers, but better yet, get a look in that house. You may find a hidden basement or treacherous stairwell that you had no idea existed. (There’s a stairwell I know of in my town that’s only about 20 inches wide at the base or landing—hardly enough room for two firefighters.)

The point is we need to encourage people to help us help them. And we need to help ourselves at every opportunity.

Scott Cook is the former chief of the Granbury (Texas) Volunteer Fire Department and a fire service instructor. He’s also a member of FireRescue’s editorial board.


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