On Tue, 25 Aug 2009 22:33:48 +0200, andrel wrote:

> On 25-8-2009 22:16, Jim Henderson wrote:
>> On Tue, 25 Aug 2009 22:01:49 +0200, andrel wrote:
>> 
>>> Every house here belongs to a town (or village if you like). Don't
>>> tell me even that is different in the US.
>> 
>> It is.  We have street addresses called "rural routes" - the post
>> office is located in the nearest town, but the house is not actually in
>> the town.
> 
> To be slighly more precise: are there houses that are outside the
> juridical borders of a city?
> Of course we have houses outside of town here, but the juridical areas
> of the towns in the Netherlands cover the whole country.

Of course all homes are in an area where law is applied (a judicial 
boundary).  But in some cases, that boundary is very, very large, and 
public services don't cover the entire area.

For example, a good friend of mine at work lost her grandson a couple 
years ago in a car accident.  The driver of the car was prosecuted for it 
(long involved story).  The court case was held in a town that was IIRC a 
significant distance from the actual area where the accident was.

If the accident hadn't happened near the freeway, it might've taken 
emergency services 20-30 minutes to get there.  As it happened, the Utah 
Highway Patrol was first on the scene.

>> Sorry if you don't believe me, but that doesn't make what I'm saying
>> false.
> 
> I have no problem to believe you, but what you seem to say does not
> match how we do things here, so I want to know if we are talking about
> the same thing.

We are talking about the same thing.  But the population density in the 
western US as a whole is very sparse compared to most European countries; 
I can understand why it's difficult to wrap one's mind around the idea 
that there isn't a fire truck "just around the corner" from any major 
area.

Randy Cassingham (who writes "This is True" wrote about his experiences 
as a volunteer EMS in his area.  He recently had to help someone who was 
having a heart attack - it took *him* 10 minutes to get to the location; 
the nearest ambulance/hospital was (I think he said) 25-30 minutes away.

http://www.thisistrue.com/blog-honest_to_goodness_good_stuff.html

(Starting at "Sunday Morning")

I don't know what his fire department arrangements are, but I imagine 
similar to their EMS arrangements.  The area he lives in is described in 
another post (http://www.thisistrue.com/blog-bear_country.html) as "550 
square miles" with about 4100 people.  That's a very low population 
density (about 75 people per square mile).

Jim

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