By Liz Beavers
lbeavers@newstribune.info
Tribune Managing Editor

KEYSER — Mineral County residents should soon start seeing some progress in the Street Mapping and Addressing Project, which has been under way since 2006.
In the project, all rural route addresses throughout the county will be converted to a street-style address (number and street name). Any names that are duplicates or are so similar that they create confusion will be changed.
This change is not only designed to help emergency crews find addresses more easily, but is also part of a move to standardize the type of addressing throughout the state.
Postcards informing residents living outside the county's five municipalities of their new address will be mailed out within the next few weeks.
According to Dennis McGann, director of the Mineral County Street Mapping and Addressing Project, however, residents may not use those addresses until officially notified by the Postal Service.
The pages-long list of road names was submitted to the Postal Service for approval this past summer, but progress in hand-keying each address into the postal system has slowed to a crawl since Mineral was just one of several counties turning their lists in at the same time.
“We understand it will be months yet,” McGann told the Mineral County Commissioners at an October meeting.
In the meantime, however, McGann is presently working on creating the over 1,300 street signs it will take to mark all the roads in the county.
Made of engineer-grade tough green fiberglass with white reflective Nikkalite lettering, each sign is being hand-made by McGann himself. After printing the letters for each sign out on a machine in his office, he then affixes the letters to the green sign, carefully working  any air bubbles out of  the material.
The double-sided signs also include a number which McGann explains is the address of the intersection.
Eventually, every intersection, bridge and public gathering place will have its own address.
He hopes to be able to start putting the signs up within the next few weeks.
“I've got some fire departments and Lions Clubs that said they would help,” he told the commissioners.
“If we do 25 signs a day, we should be able to get them all up by the end of the year.”
The street signs won't be the only new signage involved in the project, however.
Residents will be required to place clearly visible numbers on their home or, if the home is over 50 feet from the road, or not visible from the road at all, they will be required to put their numbers out next to the road.
“The county resolution requires four-inch-tall numbers,” McGann said, adding that he actually recommends 6-inch letters.
Numbers must be displayed horizontally for ease of reading.