WINFIELD, W.Va. – Every time a fire truck rolls out of the station, it costs money. The cost is less of consideration when life is in danger, but when the truck rolls upon a house which is perfectly intact, the cost, aggravation and potential harm to others who may have needed first responders becomes a huge liability.
“It’s a use of resources that could be needed at another location,” said Putnam County Emergency Services Director Frank Chapman. “It ties up resources for what ultimately turns out to be a false alarm.”
The false alarms are largely blamed on malfunctioning alarm systems or chronic neglect of those systems. Chapman said the problem became so bad county fire, rescue, or deputies were being dispatched to as many as five or six false alarms daily. The County Commission approved an ordinance which will ultimately lead to a fine for those who have chronic false alarm problems with their security systems.
“It’s been an ongoing project we’ve looked at for a couple of years, and it finally got to the point we were exhausting a lot of manpower and resources on false alarm calls,” Chapman said.
The point of the ordinance however isn’t to punish, but to educate. The first false alarms under the ordinance, which went into effect Wednesday, includes a warning and information about the ordinance. Chapman said they want people to understand the cost.
“It’s not a money making project, it’s more of a preventative and maintenance thing to get companies that have false alarms to get them fixed,” he said. “There are some of the major businesses who have an alarm go off once or twice a day and they are monitored by an alarm company and not internally.”
Chapman added the problem isn’t exclusively with businesses in Putnam County.
“We’ve had incidence where we’ve got to homes and found out a cat was setting off a motion detector,” Chapman said. “Our big push is to educate people. If you have a motion detector and you have pets in the house that’s going to set off the alarm. Our big push is education.”
However, for those who don’t get the message after the first few warnings, the procedures are in place to start causing those false alarms to hit residents in the pocketbook as well.