You may not think that much about your home address on the day to day, but those numbers and letters that indicate where you live serve many important functions.
Whether you need a package delivered or want to invite new friends over, you want to put your house on the market or need to call 911, you need to give your address to make it happen.
But what happens in distant rural places in Texas where addressing can be a bit more ad hoc — where it’s not uncommon for folks to make up a street name where one hasn’t been assigned, or where maps may not even show a road?
Mary Cantrell, who reports for the Big Bend Sentinel, looked into this issue for her corner of far West Texas and discovered that one person has made it her mission to improve addressing for the Big Bend area.
“The entity in charge of addressing for your area varies depending on where you live in the state. In some cases, it may be handled by a city department or the police department when it comes to 911. But out in the Big Bend region, we have limited governmental resources, so it is handled by our local council of governments,” Cantrell said. “And there is one woman in charge of that for our entire area, and that’s Kayse Muratori. She’s the sole addressing authority.
It’s due to a lack of manpower on the governmental level. Just not a lot of record keeping – people making up addresses, not following proper procedures. So it’s not uncommon for your house to have a few different addresses, even if you’re in a town. And if you’re in a remote location, it may not have an address and you may have to get one established.”
Muratori is from the area and is doing her best to sort out some of the inconsistencies.
“She’s very familiar with all of our unnamed roads or roads that go by many names. So she’s a great person to tackle this,” Cantrell said. “She’s just trying to clean up the addresses around the area and get proper, correct addresses for homes, whether they’re in towns or out on ranches.
And she’s even going as far as working with the national park, Big Bend National Park, to get some trails marked, so that if someone had an incident on a trail, they could call 911 and they’d be able to figure out where they are. Just making sure that everyone is safe.”
Having location information for first responders is important, Cantrell said, because sometimes the police or fire department can’t track you based on your cell phone data.
“They may be able to get a cell phone signal to talk to you, but they might not be able to triangulate your location, in which case you need to explain where you are. So it’s just important to have that analog data still,” Cantrell said. “And then it also informs a lot of other important things, like voting precinct, school district, law enforcement boundaries, census data. So it’s very wide reaching and important that her data is accurate.”
Cantrell said if you live in a remote area in Texas and don’t know what your official address is, you don’t have to wait for someone to reach out to you to figure it out.
“You can definitely be proactive about establishing a correct 911 address for your home,” she said. “The best thing to do would be to contact your local government and find out more about how they handle addressing.
It’s possible. Like I said previously, it’s a city thing or a county responsibility. So it really just varies depending on where you are. But you can definitely get in touch with your local government and figure that out.”
