Fire Services Victoria: Pranks calls, false alarms costing state millions

Fire Services Victoria has responded to more than 6000 prank calls in only four months, costing the state millions in wasted resources.

Prank calls are costing Victorians thousands, the latest data has revealed. Picture: File

Thousands of prank calls have cost Victorian firefighters millions to attend in the past four months, it can be revealed.

Fire Rescue Victoria responded to more than 9500 false alarms across the state this year between January and April this year.

Of those 6881 were deliberate prank calls, fire alarm system generated or human error.

The Country Fire Authority also received more than 1207 false alarm calls during the same period.

Fire Rescue Victoria’s acting assistant chief fire officer Steve Attard said false alarm calls were rising with a call out costing $587 per appliance per 15 minutes.

“They (false alarm calls) are increasing but need to remember the number of alarm connections are also increasing,” Mr Attard said.

The most common false alarms include old installations, fire detectors in the wrong location of a building, unintentional alarms that malfunction, malicious calls and good intent calls.

Fire Rescue Victoria respond to a call in Melbourne. Picture: Mark Stewart, on file.

Mr Attard said prank calls do happen often.

“But I suppose I’m in a department that works with these cases so I see it often ... usually when we do get prank calls — we compile a file for the police.

“We calculate how much it costs to actually get the brigades to respond to these prank calls. And if it does go to court, there's no expectation to recover costs, but it gives the judge an indication of the cost to the community.

“A little kid ringing triple-0 that doesn’t sound so bad, but a little kid ringing triple-0 and it’s costing the community so many thousands of dollars. Well, that puts things in perspective.”

Mr Attard said the impact on emergency services to respond to false alarms takes precious resources from brigades, putting undue risk on roads.

“If you‘ve got trucks responding to a false alarm and there’s a legitimate call that requires the brigade you know, it’s taking away from the amount of resources that brigade has to respond to the fire,” Mr Attard said.

“If we're continually responding to false alarms where every alarm is treated like a fire — we’re putting undue risk on the roads because of a fire trucks responding.”