Fire and rescue services who limit their response to automatic fire alarms could be risking greater property damage and potentially people’s lives.
Speaking to an audience of insurers and fire safety professionals this week, Martin Harvey, chairman of the Fire Industry Association, said there were now 29 different response policies among 43 fire and rescue services, leading to a “postcode lottery” as far as confirmation of automatic fire alarm signals is concerned.
According to the government’s own research into the issue, said Mr Harvey, a delay of one minute across the board is estimated to increase property damage by around £20m a year.
Audio recording revealed
To drive home his point, he played an audio recording in which an operator at an alarm receiving centre is heard to pass on an automatic fire alarm from an Iceland store in Nuneaton to Warwickshire Fire and Rescue Service. But the fire service control room refused to send a response in the absence of human confirmation.
Audio clip 1
Audio clip 2
What had actually happened was that customers and staff at the store had evacuated the building, so the alarm receiving centre was unable to get confirmation by phone. Sometime later, the fire service received a 999 call from someone outside the building, as a fire had indeed broken out.
As well as Warwickshire Fire and Rescue Service, Royal Berkshire, West Midlands, Essex and Kent as ‘major deviators’ from the revised CFOA protocol on false alarms published in 2010, said Mr Harvey.
But he understood that fire and rescue services were grappling with reduced budgets and that bearing down on false alarms was one way of potentially saving wasted resources.
“To be fair, we certainly sympathise with the fire brigades – they don’t want to be rushing to false alarms. There is no reason to have any false alarms – even one or two a year is not acceptable. We are at one with the fire service there.”
But there are better ways of dealing with the problem, said Mr Harvey. Businesses need to look at their risk assessments and see if fire wardens, for example, can safely investigate the cause of an alarm, rather than always resorting to the “default” of immediate and total evacuation.
He cited the Ginsters production facility in Cornwall where pies and pasties getting jammed in the production line and overheating caused around 40 false alarms a year. By simply undertaking staff training in the safe verification of such alarms, they had reduced them to one or two a year.
He also pointed to Kings College London which reduced it false alarm rate by around 44% since 2007 from its 80 or so buildings across London.
On the related issue of charging for attending false alarms, he warned that if ARCs were penalised, systems could be disconnected and life safety would be threatened. The emphasis should be reducing false alarms “at source”, and that third party certification of products and services was a key to achieving this.
