Avatar photo

Contributor

Author Bio ▼

Adam Bannister is a contributor to IFSEC Global, having been in the role of Editor from 2014 through to November 2019. Adam also had stints as a journalist at cybersecurity publication, The Daily Swig, and as Managing Editor at Dynamis Online Media Group.
March 21, 2019

Sign up to free email newsletters

Download

Whitepaper: Multi-residential access management – The move to digital

false alarms

Landmark false fire alarm study to spawn a sequel

A new European standard could be proposed as a means to tackle false fire alarms as a fire systems trade body announces plans to reopen a landmark study into the issue.

In the summer of 2018 Euralarm’s fire section published the findings of the exhaustive study, which explored the multiple causes of a problem that costs the London Fire Brigade alone £37m a year and the Scottish service £1m.

In the follow-up study the fire section will challenge Euralarm’s technical group to finesse solutions suggested in the initial study and to find further ways to combat the problem.

Euralarm will hope to recreate some real-world successes from the existing study, which was initiated after budget cuts to the fire service. Based on the study’s recommendations fire services in several countries have already changed their practices. For example, in some instances the deployment of firefighters has been made contingent on an additional verification step.

Scale and complexity

It’s a measure of the problem’s scale and complexity that it should require further study, given the original study took three years to complete and the technical group has been considering the problem since 2012.

If progress towards resolving the problem seems frustratingly slow then there is an entirely valid reason: no reduction in false alarms is ever worth a corresponding increase – however small – in the time it takes for alarms, fire safety managers or fire services to respond to genuine fires.

“We have seen that there are positive effects of false alarms and that the number of real identified fires is increasing with the number of installations. However, the proportion between the consequences of real and false alarms is not adequate,” said Sebastian Festag, chairman of the TG False Alarms.

The original study, which took a risk-based approach to studying the problem in Germany, the UK, Switzerland, Sweden and Austria/Vorarlberg, included:

  • Analysis of processes that trigger fire service intervention
  • Formulae to calculate false fire alarm ratios
  • Methodology of overall analysis
  • Recommendations and strategies for reducing false alarms

Recommendations were based on fire statistics, in particular the gap between the number of alarms triggered by actual fires and those caused by other phenomena.

One recommendation was to make false alarms avoidance a priority of site management, with the problem accounted for in fire protection and fire alarm strategies.

2023 Fire Safety eBook – Grab your free copy!

Download the Fire Safety in 2023 eBook, keeping you up to date with the biggest news and prosecution stories from around the industry. Chapters include important updates such as the Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022 and an overview of the new British Standard for the digital management of fire safety information.

Plus, we explore the growing risks of lithium-ion battery fires and hear from experts in disability evacuation and social housing.

FireSafetyeBook-CoverPage-23

Related Topics

Subscribe
Notify of
guest
2 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Michael Floyd
Michael Floyd
March 22, 2019 1:31 pm

It is not acceptable to have a poor false alarm rate with the excuse real fires might be detected more quickly. This has been an important aspect of managing a fire alarm system since at least 2002. BS 5839-1 clearly sets maximum false alarm rates below which a system is fully compliant. Above that it must be corrected and is not compliant with this section of the BS

Jonathan O’Neill
Jonathan O’Neill
March 26, 2019 5:28 am

Instinctively I feel that using a third party accredited installer for my fire alarm system should give me the confidence of competence but I would also assume that it would minimise the chances of false alarm. If that is so, as we move into the forthcoming building regulations review; I would therefore ask the I would therefore ask of the third party certification bodies, if you possibly can, please provide the evidence that third party certificated systems perform better than the unregulated market.