‘Help! Emergency! Use your ESP  to find my house!’

Please make sure your house number can be seen from the road!
That plea comes from MedStat EMS Ambulance Service personnel who find themselves all too often wandering the roads of Panola County guessing at which house has someone inside who has called for emergency medical attention.
“That’s one of the biggest things we run in to,” MedStat Northwest Regional Operations Manager James Russell said last week, speaking to the Batesville Exchange Club. “I dealt with a road yesterday where everybody had their mailbox out on the main road. When I turned on (the shared driveway), not one house had a number on the house.”
It’s a problem for law enforcement as well. Often a Panola County deputy sheriff can be overheard in conversation with emergency dispatchers trying to determine the location to which they have been summoned. The dispatcher gives the deputy a house number on such-and-such road, the deputy attempts to find the location. He or she gets close, but without a house number there is no way to pin down the exact location of the emergency. The deputy asks the dispatcher to call the number back for more specific information. And so it goes.
After several such back-and-forths recently between the deputy, dispatcher and the 911 caller, the deputy was overheard radioing to the dispatcher: “Just tell her I’ll drive down the road slow with my blue lights on and to flag me down.”
Then, after all is said and done, the ambulance people and law enforcement will get complaints about how long it took them to respond.
Panola County has something over 800 miles of roads. The county attempts diligently to post roads with signs identifying them by name, but it is up to the homeowner or renter to make sure that the structure has the identifying E-911 number visibly posted. There is a county ordinance that requires letters or numbers at least three inches high to be posted. The is no fine for not having numbers posted, but there could be consequences, tragic consequences.