Military post adds more numbers
to ZIP code to help speed up delivery
By Wayne Specht, Misawa
bureau chief
Wayne Specht / Stars and Stripes
Postal workers Airman Sergio Carpio, left, and Airman Joshua Chambliss pitch mail into
boxes at Misawa Air Base, Japan. When four additional sorting digits are added to
the basic ZIP code on letters, mail is expected to be posted to boxes throughout the
Pacific more efficiently, postal officials said. |
Got numbers for your bank account, telephones and mailbox combination
memorized?
Great. Now get ready to remember another one.
Postal officials at Pacific bases are preparing to add four digits to
ZIP codes to get letter mail into mailboxes much quicker.
Postal officials stateside have used a nine-digit ZIP code for years.
But a recent survey by the Joint Military Postal Activity-Pacific showed a potential labor
savings by using the expanded codes on stateside mail headed overseas.
“We’ll be placing fliers in mailboxes soon explaining how
it works,” said Staff Sgt. Sheila Barr, a clerk at the postal service center at
Misawa Air Base, Japan.
The coding system uses state-of-the-art sorting equipment at the U.S.
Postal Service’s International Service Center in San Francisco, where the majority of
mail headed to APO and FPO addresses gets sorted.
Barr said the equipment can save hundreds of work hours daily.
When trays of letters arrive now, workers break them down by box
numbers before pitching them into individual mailboxes.
Barr said Misawa receives about 12,000 letters daily. That figure
increases dramatically at certain times of the year, especially around Christmas.
The nine-digit ZIP codes affect only letter mail. Packages are still
sorted by hand before being placed in large bags for shipment.
Fliers will tell postal patrons which four numbers to add to their
ZIP codes, and Barr said change-of-address cards also will be placed in boxes.
Military units sending official mail just add their unit number to
the five-digit ZIP code.
“The quicker people tell their correspondents their new ZIP
codes, the quicker letters will come to us already sorted in sequence,” Barr said.
“Without the ZIP plus four, we’ll need more time to sort.”
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