Why reduce False Alarms
Most unwanted false alarms have a huge impact on both the MFB and the community.
1. Increased Risk of Accident and Injury
The MFB's responds to all emergencies under ‘bells and lights’, including calls that are found to be false alarms.
Unwanted and unnecessary calls increase the risk of accident and injury to firefighters and the general public.
2. Public Safety
- Delayed response - Vehicles and personnel deployed to a false alarm are out of action. If a real emergency occurs at the same time, appliances will have to travel further reducing the response time.
- Complacency - Many false alarms provoke the ‘boy who cried wolf’ response, and complacency can have grave consequences to public safety.
- Tampering with the alarm system - Never attempt to tamper with your alarm system or with the signal sent to fire services. This is a serious breach of public safety and has legal consequences. In addition a false alarm may incur a substantial charge.
- Congestion to 000 - Unnecessary calls impact the efficiency of emergency call takers by delaying the receiving of genuine emergency calls.
3. Waste of Business resources – time and money
- Fire Service Charges - False alarm charges can be substantial when there is no reasonable excuse.
- Disruption to business activities - Evacuations cause unproductive down time to a business – based on Australia’s Gross Domestic Product and hours worked, the average cost of lost production is $40 per hour per person (2001).
- Maintenance time and money - Inefficient fire alarm systems can result in additional maintenance work and charges.
4. Waste of Brigade resources – time and money
Time spent at false alarms is less time and resources firefighters can devote towards community work, fire prevention and other proactive practices.