New Address Forms Swamp Postal Service

Waiting for your mail to be delivered to a new address? You are not alone.

The U. S. Postal Service is receiving more than twice the average daily change of address requests in the San Fernando Valley following the Northridge earthquake, forcing postal workers into overtime at the main office on Sherman Way in Van Nuys to prevent processing delays.

“This is definitely the largest amount of change of address forms to go through the Van Nuys central forwarding unit,” U. S. Postal Service spokeswoman Terri Bouffiou said. “Normally, they get 1,000 change of address cards a day. Right now, they are getting a little under 2,500 a day.”

Valleywide, there have been 50,000 requests for changes of address.

Generally, it takes a letter or package three to four extra days to be forwarded from an old address to a new one, Bouffiou said. Despite the volume, she said, that delay is not expected to increase because the post office has added extra shifts to handle the changes.

The area where mail delivery was most affected by the temblor is Northridge, Bouffiou said. Out of 32,500 homes, businesses and other places to deliver mail in Northridge before the quake, slightly more than 4,000 are no longer accessible because they were condemned.

“One out of eight deliveries can’t be made there,” Bouffiou said.

Because of these difficulties, Bouffiou said the Postal Service has decided to continue indefinitely the practice of holding mail at the local post office for people whose homes were condemned.

An earlier plan to discontinue the program after Feb. 11, she said, was scrapped because “we really have to be concerned about people.”

Bouffiou said it will be a long time before the dust settles in the post office.

“Only about 50% of the people who will move have come in to file the change of address forms,” she said.