House numbers – an important orientation for rescue workers
Mark your house with a clearly legible house number!
Response times for emergency operations are delayed due to missing or poor signage!
Construction sites, obstructing vehicles, etc. can often delay the arrival of emergency services and fire departments. However, finding your way around the street proves more problematic, partly due to poor house numbering and partly due to a lack of people to direct you.
In many accidents or emergency medical conditions, treatment success is reduced by delays. The delay in the treatment-free interval is particularly important in cardiac arrest. For every treatment-free minute of ventricular fibrillation, the probability of survival decreases by 5%.
The use of a referral person reduces the time the emergency services need to arrive at the emergency scene by an average of 20 seconds (according to studies conducted by Rettungsdienst-Magazin 1998). However, during the studies of real-life incidents, a referral person was encountered in only one in five incidents.
Other measures that would enable the emergency services to respond more quickly would include opening gates, barriers and front doors, stopping elevators in the entrance area, locking up dogs, etc.
House numbering:
According to the Federal Building Code, every property owner is required to label their property with the number assigned by the municipality. In some federal states, municipalities regulate this requirement more precisely, but the way they do this varies considerably.
In many areas, there are no regulations regarding the form of numbering. The owner is completely free to design it. Especially in new developments, rather "abstract" numbering is often found, which, while decorative, is of little use from an emergency services perspective.
Examples of poorly visible house numbers:
hidden numbers, house numbers with the same color as their background (white number on a white background), poorly visible installation (too low or on the wrong side of the house - not facing the street).
Both improving house numbering and using a referral agent can shorten the travel time to the emergency site and thus the treatment-free interval by about half a minute.
