PARIS — When an ambulance responding to a call in Roxbury two weeks ago found a stretch of homes without numbers, a dispatcher had to call the home and ask for a description of the house.

“There wasn’t one of them in a stretch of road maybe a half-mile, mile long that had their address, either on a mailbox or on a house,” Oxford County dispatcher Charles Fillebrown said.

It added several minutes to the response time, he said. Luckily, the call wasn’t critical.

Those extra minutes can be a matter of life or death, Fillebrown said. “If someone has chest pains, you don’t have 10 minutes to waste.”

Despite a local ordinance requiring them and years of effort to get Maine residents to display addresses on their homes, responders in Oxford County still find themselves scrambling to find unlabeled homes. Dispatchers and responders worry it could cost lives.

Fillebrown said many are suspicious of the effort, saying a house number makes it easier for bill collectors to harass them. Many rural residents use post office boxes rather than labeled mailboxes, letting their homes sit anonymous.

Paris Fire Chief Brad Frost said there are unlabeled homes all over town, especially on High Street and on Elm Hill and Hebron roads. “Either signs aren’t posted where you can see them, or they’re all the way down or there’s none at all, or they go from 180 to 157 back to 200 again,” Frost said.

“We’ve sent out notices and everything else and I don’t know what it is. I don’t know what we’re going to do,” he said. “If we can’t find them, we can’t help them.”

Paris has an Addressing Ordinance passed in 1997 that says each home or business must have an address, and the number must be visible from the road. Buildings hidden from the road must have a sign at the end of the driveway.

The town can fine residents between $25 and $250 for violating the ordinance.

Town Manager Phil Tarr said he discussed the matter with Gerald Samson, the town’s code enforcement officer, at a meeting in July. Samson is in charge of enforcing the Addressing Ordinance

“We’re designing a plan that will be a combination of notification and enforcement,” Tarr said. The plan is to send patrol officers to canvas the town, taking note of unlabeled homes a section at a time.

Tarr said previous efforts have proven difficult due to the town’s size. This time, the town will go area-by-area, working toward 100 percent compliance in each location.

Fillebrown, a retired Maine state trooper, said the problem has gone on for decades. “It’s a situation where people are only hurting themselves,” he said.

treaves@sunjournal.com