By THOMAS GRILLO
LYNN — Crying wolf could get more expensive.
If the city gets its way, it will cost more when your alarm brings firefighters and there’s no fire.
Under the amended ordinance that will be considered at a public hearing on Tuesday, Jan. 10 at City Hall, fines for false alarms will be increased for the first time in seven years.
If approved by the city council, the first two false alarms are forgiven. But a third will cost home and commercial property owners $100, up from $50. And it increases from there with $200 for the fourth, up from $150, and $300 for five or more.
“It makes sense, the people who have malfunctioning fire alarms should be held accountable,” said Mayor Judith Flanagan Kennedy. “Any time firefighters or police respond to an emergency, they run the risk of accidents and could be tying first responders up on a nonsense call when something important could be going on.”
Officials hope that the fines will encourage home and building owners and managers to improve the maintenance of their fire alarm systems.
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In 2014, the most recent data available, fire departments in the U.S. responded to nearly 2.5 million false alarms, five times the number of structure fires, according to the National Fire Protection Association. That’s up from nearly 900,000 false alarms in 1980.
About one-third of these alarms are caused by problems in the fire alarm system itself.
Many of these were triggered by commercial monitored connections, including apartment buildings, hotels and dormitories, NFPA said. The share of alarms coming from occupancies with automatic fire alarms has increased as these systems have become more common.
Unwanted alarms have also taken an increasing toll on the nation’s fire service in the form of fuel costs, apparatus wear and tear, risk of collision and injury during response, and a growing complacency when responding to automatic alarms, NFPA said.
Lynn District Fire Chief Stephen Archer referred questions about the ordinance to Lt. Israel Gonzalez in the fire prevention division, who said he was unaware of the proposal.
Kennedy did not know how many false alarms occur in Lynn or how much money is lost annually by them.
“It’s difficult to quantify,” she said. “But nothing positive comes out of responding to a false alarm.”
Thomas Grillo can be reached at [email protected].