NORTH ANDOVER - When an emergency happens at your home, how confident are you that fire, police or ambulance drivers will be able to find your house? Retired North Andover Firefighter Ray McNeil wants to make sure they can.  

McNeil makes address signs for local residents in Lawrence, Andover, North Andover and Methuen for a small donation but says that he will do pro-bono work for families who need the signs but cannot afford to make a donation.

Emergency officials like Deputy Fire Chief Bill Martineau say that too often emergency response time to fires or medical emergencies are hampered by residents not posting their address numbers on their home. "We encourage people to put large address numbers on the outside of their homes. If we can’t determine where an address is, it takes too much time to find the house, especially at night. That puts people's lives at risk. We encourage them to use large numbers on the house itself. Some people have a large driveway and in those cases we strongly encourage people to have their house number somewhere at the end of their driveway."  

Martineau says that the donations taken in from McNeil's address signs go towards a public education fund. "With that donated money, Chief Dolan and Fire Prevention Officer Andrew Melnikas put on fire safety demonstrations for children. It's really a win-win situation for everyone."  

Martineau said that the Fire Department has purchased a fire safety trailer for public education for younger children in the schools. "They bring the trailer to schools, inject artificial smoke into the trailer so that they can see how smoke travels. We teach kids how to get low in a fire so they can breathe and crawl themselves to safety."

To order an address sign for your home or to make a donation to the Fire Prevention Safety Trailer, you can send a check to the attention of Fire Chief William Dolan, 124 Main St., North Andover MA 01845

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