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Can your address numbers be seen from the road? Do you even have address numbers?

In the event that you call 911 in an emergency, time is of the essence. Although it is fairly easy to spot a column of smoke from a house fire, it is difficult to see someone’s heart attack from the street. In a medical emergency, firefighter’s may waste valuable time to knock on several doors to try and find a correct address. Make sure your address is clearly visible from the street.

Recommended guidelines:

House numbers should be no less than 4" tall.

Numbers should be in a contrasting color to the color scheme of the building.

House numbers should be visible up tp 150 feet, from all angles.

Be sure house numbers can be seen at night.

Keep house numbers clearly visible throughout the year. Plant growth during certain seasons can hide numbers.

Remember that fire vehicles sit up higher than automobiles. Low hanging limbs can obstruct the view that would normally be visible to others

Another perspective on the visibility of house numbers may be stated this way: Can your address be seen from the street while sitting in a vehicle in the middle of the night? After all, that’s how an emergency vehicle approaching a residence may be looking at it.

Any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact the firehouse at 815-728-0088.

RINGWOOD – Bill and Sue Cook held each other for a few moments and watched as a three-alarm fire destroyed their home at 6318 Barnard Mill Road in Ringwood on a frigid Sunday afternoon.
More than a dozen fire departments spent more than three hours extinguishing the fire, which began about 11:50 a.m. Sunday, officials said. No one was injured in the incident that had firefighters working in near zero-degree temperatures, Wonder Lake Fire Chief John Rice said. “Initially, we had three people inside,” he said. “We extracted them from the building.” Rice said the fire likely started on the first floor of the two-story home and could have been sparked by a fireplace fire. He said the incident appeared unrelated to a fire that consumed a neighboring home Saturday night in the 5400 block of Wainwright Drive in Wonder Lake. “There’s no indication of anything suspicious at this time,” he said. Rescue workers from Richmond, Spring Grove, Woodstock, Round Lake, Fox Lake, Union, Marengo, Harvard, Hebron, Crystal Lake, Algonquin, Cary, Huntley, Lakewood, Wauconda, Fox River Grove, Twin Lakes, Wis., Bloomfield, Wis., Randall, Wis., and Nunda and McHenry townships responded to the scene, officials said. Rice said firefighters brought water from Wonder Lake to extinguish the fire because there were no hydrants at the scene. He said the Cooks planned to spend Sunday night with relatives. The Cooks declined to comment on the fire.

By JILLIAN DUCHNOWSKI -If a building catches fire in Spring Grove, firefighters from Hebron, Wonder Lake and Richmond automatically answer the call, too.
And, thanks to a $490,621 federal grant, those firefighters within months will use computers that can show hazardous areas, vantage points and other data, as well as GPS systems, before they arrive on the scene.The grant completes the communications systems upgrades that the four small departments started three years ago, when Spring Grove officials used a grant to establish a radio frequency for the four departments, said Rich Tobiasz, chief of the Spring Grove Fire Protection District.“This isn’t something that transpired over six months,” said John Rice, chief of the Wonder Lake Fire Protection District. “It’s been something we’ve been working on for three years.”The four departments created the Fire North Quad, which meets monthly for joint training and automatically responds to structure fires in member territories. The four fire chiefs applied for the Department of Homeland Security grant just weeks after the Quad formed in February.The grant will provide portable and mobile radios throughout the four departments, repeaters to fix “dead spots” in radio signals, a new pager system, and computers for all fire department vehicles.“A lot of this stuff we would not be able to obtain with the tax dollars we receive,” Rice said. “There’s just no way we could have afforded it.”The upgrades will make the four departments’ systems completely compatible. Together, the four departments have 163 firefighter-paramedics covering 126 square miles and about 26,000 people, Rice said.“If a firefighter from one town has a bad radio, they can obtain a spare radio that is identical to the one that’s down,” Rice said.
The four fire chiefs plan to meet next month to start deciding how to buy and install the equipment, Tobiasz said. The grant gives them a year to do that, but they expect to receive the computers and pagers well before the deadline.