By Jim Nesbitt, Staff Writer
The News & Observer (Raleigh, North Carolina)
Copyright 2007 The News and Observer
RALEIGH, N.C. — As winds whipped the flames that gutted more than two dozen new townhouses in North Raleigh last week, an excited caller tried to wrap his Southern tongue around a street name straight out of upstate New York.
On the other end, a terse-voiced 911 dispatcher, distracted by other calls from the crisis, pushed the caller to spell the name he also found unfamiliar: Oneonta Avenue.
Whether the tortured three-minute exchange delayed firefighters rolling to the Pine Knoll Townes fire is a matter of debate between emergency dispatch officials and Raleigh firefighters. But they agree the struggle is a worrisome byproduct of the county’s growth. The explosion of street names complicates quick, clear communication about the location of home invasions or heart attack victims.
The constant addition of subdivisions and office parks in Wake County has created a floodtide of new street names, 800 since January of last year, county planners say. That boosts the county’s total to more than 18,300.
By contrast, Durham County has added 103 street names since July 2006, for a total of 5,206, said Jim Soukup, Durham’s director of emergency communications.
In Wake, the rising tide of names heightens the likelihood a dispatcher won’t recognize an address.
“They have no idea where some of these streets are,” said Bayleaf Fire Department Chief Ron Roof. “They’re at the mercy of the caller spelling it correctly and pronouncing it correctly.”
Firefighters, paramedics, cops and deputies must scan frequent updates from county planners on the latest building projects in their districts. They prowl their turf, searching for new subdivisions and street names.
The pace of development has created a tangle of strange street names as developers struggle to avoid duplicating what’s already on the map.
Consider Xanthacarpa Court, in an Apex subdivision where most streets are named for varieties of dogwood trees. Dispatchers and paramedics have placed it on the county’s unofficial top 10 list of names difficult to pronounce, spell or understand. That street name is even misspelled -- it should be Xanthocarpa, which is the scientific name for the American holly tree.
In addition, there are deliberate misspellings, conjured-up nonsense words, tongue twisters and tribal and place names foreign to Southerners.
“Frankly, the pronounceable, understandable street names are all taken,” said Barry Furey, director of the Raleigh-Wake County Emergency Communications Center, a city department that handles emergency calls for Raleigh and most of Wake County.
Despite computer-aided equipment, sophisticated map displays and software, dispatchers are dependent on accurate spelling from often-panicked callers.
“Most people expect 911 to know where everything is, and that’s just not the case,” said a supervisor who works for Furey, Brent Boykin, a 23-year veteran. “There’s no way we can be fully versed on every street name in a growth county like this.”
Confusion about the spelling of Oneonta Avenue didn’t delay the response to the Pine Knoll Townes fire, Furey said.
Raleigh Assistant Fire Chief Larry Stanford isn’t so sure.
“It could have contributed,” he said.
Nine minutes to arrive
It took nine minutes for Engine 19 of the Raleigh Fire Department to arrive from its station on Spring Forest Road, said Walt Fuller, assistant director of the Raleigh-Wake emergency dispatch center. That’s three minutes longer than the recommended response time for urban fire departments under National Fire Protection Association guidelines.
Fuller blames the response time on an explosion and fire that killed three people minutes before on Roselle Court. Engine 11, the unit nearest the Pine Knoll Townes fire, was sent to Roselle Court, forcing dispatchers to send another engine from farther afield to Pine Knoll, Fuller said.
Stanford said the force of the wind-driven fire made the longer response time moot.
“I don’t see where the outcome would have been different,” he said. “Those units would have been burning whether you got there quicker or not.”
For the past decade, county planners have required developers to get advance approval for proposed street names, said John Rukavina, Wake public safety director. The applications are scrutinized to avoid duplicate names as well as names that sound alike but are spelled differently, all in an attempt to make emergency communications clear.
Wake’s rock-and-roll growth has undermined this. And that has Rukavina and county planners studying how other high-growth counties handle the problem. They’re considering an ordinance to give the county more power over street names.
In the meantime, developers have broken the rules of grammar, spelling, brevity and, some say, common sense to get street names past planners.
In Raleigh, there’s Metedeconk Lane and Pacagoula Way, which appears to be a derivative of Pascagoula, Miss. Raleigh also has Russling Leaf Lane and will soon add Chustenahlah Drive, said Mike McDow, a city planning technician and street names specialist.
Developers often submit a proposed list of street names four or five times to county planners before gaining approval, said Bill Spang, the Chapel Hill-based developer of Pine Knoll Townes and other projects.
Names from the North
That’s why Spang, who used to live in Syracuse, N.Y., transplanted town names from the interior of the Empire State. He figured names like Oneonta Avenue and Binghampton Lane (the city is Binghamton, without a P) wouldn’t be common in Wake County. For the entrance to the complex, he wanted to use Rhinebeck Lane, but that was already in play.
Spang is also responsible for the Apex subdivision with the dogwood streets. He’s not surprised Xanthacarpa Court made the county’s top 10 list.
That doesn’t make life easier for Apex Fire Chief Mark Haraway and his firefighters. “My guys go on a four-day break and there may be a new street name waiting for them,” Haraway said. “They pop out that fast.”