FROM 28TH FEBRUARY, Essex County Fire & Rescue Service (ECFRS) will no longer respond to automatic business fire alarms – nor will they respond to anonymous public telephone kiosk calls in which the person dials 999 and then abandons the call by hanging-up.
An analysis of incidents attended by the Service over a 15-month period, from April 2009 to June 2010. has identified that ECFRS responded to almost 25,000 incidents in total, of which AFAs accounted for 28 per cent.
Ninety-seven per cent of these were false alarms.
Chief Fire Officer, David Johnson, said that domestic tax payers should not bear the burden of industrial or commercial premises failing to maintain their automatic fire alarms.
‘I am sure that home owners and businesses would rather our fire crews and appliances are ready to respond to their real emergencies, rather than them not being available because they are sitting outside factories or offices dealing with yet another of the thousands of false alarms that the Service gets on a yearly basis,’ he said.
Under new procedures, fire-fighters will not respond to AFAs unless a follow up call is received to confirm a fire.
It's probably for the best, considering how often fire alarms go off at my workplace for no apparent reason. It'd be a good idea to stop wasting all that fuel and human resources on occasions when there is no actual imminent danger.
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