This past year the Dauphin Fire Department responded to 206 incidents.
Even though that’s a decrease from the 229 incidents in 2018, Fire Chief Cam Abrey says 2019 was a fairly busy year.
The highest occurring incident remains to be false alarms, which makes up for 33 per cent of calls.
The DFD wants to make it clear that false alarms are when no smoke or fire was involved in the alarm activating.
Causes of false alarms may include humidity, construction dust, dirty detectors and fire drills where the property manager did not notify their monitoring company that they were doing tests.
Behind false alarms, the highest percentage of responses were car accidents at 19 per cent, kitchen fires at 17 per cent, outdoor fires at 14 per cent, and structure fires at 9 per cent.
Abrey would like to remind the public.
“If you are conducting a fire drill and you have a monitored alarm, please call your monitoring company to advise in order to prevent the Department from being dispatched. Under the City of Dauphin’s By-Law 09/2019, a property owner may be charged for ‘False Alarms’.”
Each property is allowed their first two false alarms at no charge, however, the third is $350.00, the fourth $500.00 and each subsequent false alarm is charged at $800.00 per occurrence.
From the past decade, 2019 ranked just below the average of 215 incidents and was the 7th busiest year out of the 2010s.
