Rural Address Property Identification facts for kids
RAPID stands for Rural Address Property IDentification. It's a special system used in New Zealand to help emergency services like ambulances, fire trucks, and police find homes and properties in the countryside quickly. This system was first started in 1999. It helps make sure that help can arrive as fast as possible, even in places where addresses might be tricky to find.
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What is Rural Addressing?
The RAPID system is now officially known as Rural Addressing. This name was adopted in 2003. It's a standard way to give every rural property a clear and easy-to-understand address. This standard helps everyone, from delivery drivers to emergency teams, know exactly where they need to go.
How Does Rural Addressing Work?
Rural Addressing uses numbers that tell you how far a property is from the start of a road. Imagine you see an address like 1536 Longley Road. To understand it, you just divide the number by 100. So, 1536 divided by 100 is 15.36. This means the property is about 15.36 kilometers from where Longley Road begins.
This system is super helpful for emergency crews. When they start driving down a rural road, they can set their vehicle's trip meter to zero. They know they don't need to look for house numbers until their trip meter gets close to the RAPID number they are looking for. This saves valuable time in an emergency.
Why Do Rural Properties Need Special Numbers?
Rural properties often have long driveways or are far apart. They might not have clear house numbers like homes in a city. The RAPID system makes sure that every rural property has a unique and easy-to-find number. Some properties even have more than one RAPID number if they have different entrances from the road. This is useful if visitors need to get to different parts of a large farm, like a barn or a stockyard.
RAPID and Disaster Preparedness
The word RAPID is also used for a project by the New Zealand Ministry of Civil Defence and Emergency Management. This project is called Response And Preparedness In Disasters. This shows how important quick identification and location are, not just for daily emergencies but also for bigger events like natural disasters.
