A busy year for the Fire Service but figures show a large drop in malicious prank calls

THE number of prank calls being made to the Fire Service in Kerry have dropped sharply, according to new figures published by Kerry County Council.

This week the council published a full break down of all Kerry Fire Brigade Service call-outs between January and November 2018.

The figures show that in the period, the Fire Service responded to five ‘malicious’ false alarm callouts. That’s compared to 26 malicious false call outs in the same period in 2017.

In all, last year the service responded to 132 false alarms, though the vast majority of them (127) were mistakenly made with good intentions on the part of the callers.

Over the course of the 11 months, the Fire Service was mobilised 1,108 times and responded to a total of 940 separate incidents.

Of those, most involved fires, with the service responding to 110 chimney fires; 197 gorse fires, up from 174; and 228 ‘other’ fires.

Among the other incidents the Fire Service was tasked to were 117 road traffic accidents; 33 rescues from unspecified hazards; nine flooding incidents and two cases where people had to be rescued from lakes, river or sea waters.

In all the service responded to 535 fires and 273 non-fire related incidents as well as 132 ‘false alarm’ call-outs.

In terms of building control, the service received 142 applications for fire safety certificates and 114 applications for disability access certs.

A total of 485 building commencement notices were also forwarded to the service, an increase of 17 per cent on the same period in 2017, when 412 building commencement notices were sent to the service.