posted on Tuesday, April 29, 2008 9:06 AM
by
klehan
Nationwide False Alarms Reduced in 2006
The latest statistics compiled by NFPA show false alarm calls to the nation's fire departments dipped slightly in 2006, but overall calls continued to rise
-- topping 24.4 million for the year.
Medical calls to fire departments surpassed 15 million for that year, continuing a trend that is seeing fire calls decline and medical calls increase.
In 2006, U.S. fire departments responded to 2,119,500 false alarms, according to NFPA's new report. This total was 0.7 percent below the total of 2,134,000 false alarms the previous year.
System malfunctions decreased 3.3 percent in 2006 from the year before, to 721,000 (34 percent of all false alarms. Encouragingly, malicious false calls decreased 19.5 percent for the year, to 193,500s. Unintentional false calls (e.g., tripping an interior alarm accidentally) accounted for 850,000 false alarms, or 40.1 percent of the total. Other false calls including bomb scares were 355,000 (16.8 percent of all false calls), the report states.