The Yurok Tribe
Addressing
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Addressing on the Yurok Reservation
Address numbers for the upriver reservation were reassigned in 2015 to fit the Yurok Tribe's addressing criteria to better serve the community and enable a standardized system in order to move forward with our goals of incorporating physical addresses into mail delivery as well as location based navigation, services, and apps. Using the new assigned address numbers will allow emergency vehicles using the 911 system to locate residents in a more efficient manner.
Background
Addressing of the upriver portion of the Yurok Reservation started back around 2009 with the Public Safety Department and the COPS METH grant. There was a full time GIS Analyst working for Public Safety under the grant that began collecting residential points from the officers and then began the process of assigning physical addresses.
This position only lasted a couple of years and this project was passed to the Planning Department along with the Transportation Program. The GIS Program acquired the digital data from Public Safety and put together a Yurok Tribe Addressing and Road Naming Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) and a set of request forms to help guide this project into the future.
The addresses that had originally been assigned did not follow the general standard or typical practice of national localities. We want to standardize physical addresses on the Reservation to provide ease of navigation for faster and more effective response time for emergency vehicles along with making it substantially easier for community members and their families to locate their destination. In order to do this we reassigned addresses to the upriver homes that follow the Standard Operating Procedures for Addressing, these procedures follow national standards more closely, which is also the most intuitive approach while driving, and outlines the process of assigning addresses. The SOP was reviewed and approved by the Transportation Committee as well as the Tribal Council.
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GIS
As a part of the addressing effort reservation roads have been digitally created, edited, and updated to be of use with an address locator tool within the GIS to quickly and easily locate existing addresses with a search tool, as well as easily assign new ones. The GIS Program used this tool to create new addresses that match the criteria set by the Yurok Tribe Addressing and Road Naming SOP. Each address is based upon a 1000 address points per mile system with the odd addresses on the left side of the road and the even addresses on the right side of the road.
For example if an address is 1205 Tulley Creek Rd, you will know by reading the address that it is 1.205 miles up Tulley Creek Rd on the left side of the road. The direction for address numbers for each road is decided by its connection to a major road or in the case of a loop the lowest address point on the highest classified road. Roads are ranked based on the order of: Interstate, Other Freeways and Expressways, Other Principal Arterial, Minor Arterial, Major Collector, Minor Collector, Local, and Trails; whereas each class of road must stem from a road of one class higher.
For example Highway 101 would be a first class road because it is an interstate and the most major road on or near the Yurok Reservation; therefore Highway 169 would be a second class road and would start in Klamath where it intersects with Highway 101(1st class) and continues up the river. Roads stemming directly from Highway 169 would be 3rd class roads and so on. By creating this address locator and reassigning addresses based on this system we will be able to better serve the community and enable a standardized system in order to move forward with our goals of incorporating physical addresses into mail delivery as well as location based navigation, services, and apps.
Additional Resources