Five false fire alarms a day from schools and colleges

Published on Wednesday 27 July 2011 14:27

FIRE crews are being called out to around five false alarms per day in schools, nurseries colleges and universities, costing the taxpayer hundreds of thousands of pounds. New figures reveal that 96 per cent of term-time calls to educational establishments in the last year were false alarms.

Only a handful of calls were for genuine emergencies, ranging from fires to gas incidents and people being trapped.

It costs around 450 per hour to send one fire engine and a crew out to an incident, resulting in the false alarms racking up a bill of just under 400,000. The worst offenders were schools, followed by colleges and universities.

The unnecessary call-outs were mainly the result of automatic fire alarms (AFAs) going off, although they also include hoax calls and malicious activation of break glass points.

Fire chiefs say they have a duty to attend all AFAs but insist they are working with organisations to reduce the number of unnecessary call-outs.

Only one appliance is now sent out to AFAs - except when a "high risk" building is involved - while work is being done with school pupils and students to make them aware of the dangers of hoax calls and maliciously setting off alarms.

David Lockhart, community safety manager at Lothian and Borders Fire and Rescue Service, said: "We have worked hard to reduce the impact on the organisation and the public in terms of our response to AFAs.

"This has included a reduced initial attendance of one appliance to calls received from alarm monitoring companies.

"In addition, each month our community safety department identifies the worst premises for generating AFAs.

"We then liaise with the management to look at ways of reducing activations."

The figures include call-outs to fires at disused school buildings, such as the massive blaze at the old Craigroyston Community High on Pennywell Road in July last year.

Councillor Mike Bridgman, convener of the Lothian and Borders Fire and Rescue Board, added: "The fire service does everything it can to educate the kids through programmes such as the Cool Down Crew.

"We have to look at the issue of AFAs as a whole because the fire crews have to treat each one as a serious call."