The Estevan Fire Rescue Service is dealing with a bad case of "premature dispatch."
The department has been inundated with a rash of false alarms in 2013 and is hoping that an education campaign will curb the problem.
In an interview Friday, Chief Ron Tocker said the department has been called to almost 70 false alarms this year. As recently as 2010, the EFRS had just 20, a total they topped in July alone.
Tocker said the culprit is the new alarm and monitoring systems that have been installed in many Estevan homes over the past couple of years.
The chief said while they support those systems "1,000 per cent" they are asking homeowners to ensure they are fully aware of how to operate them.
He said the issue they are dealing with is that many of the alarms are tripped by something as simple as burnt toast. Once the alarm is initiated, the company monitoring them calls the home and asks for the password. Many of the homeowners are not answering that phone call or do not know their password, which in both cases prompts an immediate call to the fire department.
"These systems are fantastic," Tocker said. "But what's happening is people are forgetting their password or they are running around trying to get the smoke out of the house and they are not answering the phone."
Tocker added they have also run into cases where kids are home by themselves and do not know the password. They also had instances where someone house sitting or babysitting in the residence sets the alarm off and has not been given the password.
"There is a duty of responsibility on that homeowner to answer that phone or whoever is in that home, at that time, should know that password," he said.
Tocker said the false alarms are taking a toll on the department in a variety of ways.
On the financial side, he noted that each call comes with a significant cost to taxpayers. Although homeowners are charged for the false alarm - $200 for the first, $225 for the second and $250 for the third and subsequent false alarms - it does not come close to covering the costs for each call out.
"Every time there is a call out here, that is a cost to the City. If we went by the hourly charge, it would be way more than what (the penalties are)."
The human toll is also a major concern of theirs. The members of the EFRS are not career firefighters, they are paid, on-call volunteer firefighters who are taking time away from their families and work to keep residents safe.
"We get these calls 24 hours a day," Tocker said. "Mainly at supper time it gets heavy but last night, 1 o'clock in the morning. That is hard on the system for our firefighters. We are at about 70 (false alarms) right now. That is an awful lot of calls for our firefighters to just drop their life and respond because we don't know that it is a false alarm.
"That many calls per year is an awfully large draw and a huge task to be asking these guys to give up their lives - whether it is an hour or whatever it takes - that many times per year when they have jobs, families and their own leisure time."
Tocker said because all firefighters are allowed to leave work by their employers, they are also very concerned about how the increase in call volume impacts those businesses and their willingness to allow their employees to remain on the department.
"If we get our firefighters employers' saying 'I don't want you going anymore,' that is going to hurt every single person in Estevan."
To combat the false alarm problem, the EFRS is asking that everyone in the city who has a monitoring system have a method in place to prevent unnecessary calls to the department. The most obvious and important step is to make sure those staying in the house know the password.
"If you have that monitored fire alarm system, please be diligent with it. Please remember your password, give your password out to your kids, a babysitter, someone who is going to be in your house for awhile that may accidentally set the system off."
Tocker said he would also like people to bear in mind the number one reason the alarms are going off - kitchen fires - and do what they can to prevent them.
For more on preventing kitchen fires, which just happens to be the theme for Fire Prevention Week in 2013, please see The Mercury's Fire Prevention Week section.
