The right call F
Over half of all call outs to suspected fi res turn out to be false alarms and fi re services are putting an end to universal attendance in an attempt to reduce wasted resources. Andrew Brister looks at the implications for contractors
alse alarms are the bane of the fire sector. Government statistics show that more than half of call outs by emergency services to suspected fi res turn out to be false alarms. For the year April 2009
to March 2010, in England the Fire and Rescue Services attended 527,000 fi re call outs. A staggering 285,000 of these were false alarms. The knock-on effect of false alarms is wasted resources,
with a signifi cant impact on both fi re brigades and local businesses. False alarms reduce the availability of fi re and rescue services for real fi res and are a massive fi nancial liability. They cost industry in lost production time and affect the safety of building occupants by increasing evacuation time in real fi re situations because of the ‘crying wolf’ effect. The cost to the UK is put at more than £1 billion each year. The Chief Fire Offi cers’ Association (CFOA) is at the heart of
efforts to usher in a national strategy that will allow fi re brigades to deal with false alarms more effi ciently. It has produced the Protocol for the Reduction of False Alarms and Unwanted Fire Signals and more recently the Code of Practice for Summoning
a Fire Response via Fire Alarm Monitoring Organisations. There are two distinct elements that the CFOA protocol
seeks to address – false alarms and unwanted fi re signals. A false alarm does not affect the fi re and rescue service, provided it is dealt with by the occupant of the premises. An unwanted fi re signal occurs when a false alarm is passed to the fi re and rescue service, it receives an emergency response and is found to be a false alarm, creating an unnecessary drain on resources.
About the author
Andrew Brister Andrew Brister is a freelance journalist and editor. He has been involved in the building services sector for more than 20 years.
On alert Basically, the CFOA has introduced a risk-based approach to response to an alarm. Take what happens in a domestic situation. If a smoke alarm goes off, the householder knows what’s caused it, resets it and goes about their business and the fi re services don’t need to be called. CFOA’s guidelines essentially apply the same principle to any premises. Alarm receiving centres (ARCs) have agreed that they will call any domestic households responsible for signals they receive to fi rst check if it is a false alarm before mobilising fi re services. This is already making a big difference to fi re services teams. They simply aren’t getting calls where there are no fi res. But can you apply such a strategy to premises such as hospitals? The argument seems to be that hospitals are no different. Members of the public and staff in hospitals tend to cause false alarms and unless there is a confi rmed fi re, why are emergency services being mobilised? Sheltered accommodation is a different matter, because of the way that wardens have been withdrawn. There is a sleeping risk, and there are vulnerable people with impaired mobility so brigades are more likely attend to every call, assuming each one is a fi re.
Adoption CFOA’s work has the support of the industry at large, including the ECA’s Fire and Security Association (FSA) and ARCs. The problem is that there is no compulsion for local services to accept the protocol. Steve Kimber, chairman of the FSA and managing director of monitoring centres Southern Monitoring Services and Northern Monitoring Services, is concerned at the lack of unity: ‘Individual chief fi re offi cers are fi efdoms in their own right and feel that they are best placed to decide what is the best policy that they should be implementing within their force area. Yet, the industry and CFOA have sat down to develop a policy, and it has taken many years to develop this nationally, that is better than any one individual’s take on things.’ Kimber feels that there could be tough implications for
those that don’t follow the industry-accepted best practice. ‘I guess the proof of the pudding will be if and when a fi re situation is actioned in accordance with a local policy, and something goes wrong and that ends up in court and
54 ECA Today July 2011
PJF / SHUTTERSTOCK
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