New provincial legislation that received second reading in the legislature on April 23 will, if passed, allow for authorities to fine people making “frivolous” 911 calls.
Kathleen Range, a spokeswoman for the provincial Municipal Affairs ministry, said a frivolous call is defined as “any call deliberately made to abuse the system” or waste emergency officials' time and the fines are $5,000 for a first-time offence and $10,000 for repeat offences.
When asked how big a problem frivolous calls are in the province, Range said she couldn't provide a quantitative answer.
“But during the consultation with call centre professionals it was determined that we needed to deter people from making frivolous calls and introduce it in the legislation,” she said.
Range added call centre operators who take 911 calls “who feel that they have been subject to frivolous calls will be able to place a complaint with their local police service.”
“No one will be fined for calling 911 in good faith or by accident.”
Acting Cpl. S.D. Bereza, a spokesman for the Olds RCMP, said it's rare that anyone actually deliberately abuses the 911 system anymore, however, thanks to almost universal call-identification technology.
The bigger problem, in his opinion, is when police waste time responding to 911 calls caused by “pocket dials” or misdials, false alarms or instances when people use the 911 service for the wrong reasons.
Just this year, between Jan. 1 and April 19, Olds police dealt with 51 911 calls caused by pocket dials, misdials or children playing with phones.
During that same time period, police dealt with 73 911 calls resulting from false alarms due to security systems at homes and businesses in the area that were triggered either by human or equipment error.
In some cases, Bereza said, people will call 911 for non-emergencies just because they don't know how to reach police otherwise or they don't know who to contact in case of a problem.
For example, he said, a woman in a community where he was previously stationed called 911 when the washing machine she was using at a laundry facility stopped working.
The number of such calls is starting to “tax the members,” Bereza said, especially if responding to a misdialed or accidental call to 911 pulls an officer away from something more serious.
And no matter how sure an officer is that a 911 call is a mistake or a false alarm, police will respond to every one, he added.
“We don't want to get complacent,” Bereza said. “I wouldn't feel comfortable as a member not showing up, because you never know.”
No taxpayer, however, wants police and dispatchers tied up with calls that waste their time, he said, and although he was unsure of how much accidental or false alarm 911 calls cost the detachment each year, Bereza hinted the amount is significant.
“It adds up.”
Fining people for improperly using the system is fine, Bereza said.
“If that's what it takes for people to use 911 appropriately, then that's what the province should do.”
But he added he wouldn't ever want the fear of a fine to make a person second-guess calling emergency responders in an actual emergency.
That's why the province should also expand educational programs for letting the public know when to use 911, Bereza said, and how to use their best judgment when they see something that might warrant using the 911 system.
“What's a 911 call to some people might not be a 911 call to others.”
Lorne Thompson, chief of the Olds Fire Department, said he knows all too well about people using the 911 system with the best of intentions but ending up wasting the time of local firefighters, their families and their employers.
Each winter, he said, the department fields roughly a dozen calls from motorists on Highway 2 who call 911 when they see a vehicle slide off a ditch but no one is injured and the driver simply needs a tow-truck.
“A passerby sees this car in the ditch, calls 911 and says ‘I've seen an accident,'” Thompson said. “And then they don't stop to check, they just keep going. So our dispatch has no choice but to send us based on the limited information that was given to them.”
The department also often gets called out to “investigate smells” people believe are gas or chemical leaks that more often than not end up being caused by a skunk or a truck carrying chemicals passing through town, Thompson said.
“We do get (such calls) occasionally and what it does for us is we have to set off a page to get the members to come down. They could be at work, they could be at home, it could be the middle of the night. So they have to get out of bed, leave work, come down here and get into trucks and we get there and find out that it's nothing. Well, you've wasted a lot of their times.”
And aside from that wasted time, money is being lost, either by an employer who is losing productivity when a volunteer firefighter has to leave work, or by the department, which can bill the province $400 a unit when they roll out to respond to calls on any numbered highway, Thompson said.
With the standard deployment for a Highway 2 crash response being a pumper, command vehicle, rescue truck and a tanker, the bill can come to $1,600.
If the department is mustered for a call that is then determined to be a false alarm, it still costs taxpayers about $250 on average to cover honorariums for the firefighters' time.
The department also has to deal with its share of false alarms caused by malfunctions in security and detection systems, the accidental pulling of fire alarms or “burnt toast calls,” where an alarm system is triggered due to a tied-in smoke alarm going off when someone burns food, Thompson said.
In both 2011 and 2012, the department recorded 31 fire alarms that were “stood down” for one reason or another, he added.
While public education about how to use 911 and ensuring security and smoke detection systems are operating properly are good ideas, Thompson said the department and the town are also looking at upgrading a municipal bylaw to include penalties for “nuisance” alarms where firefighters have to repeatedly respond to false alarms at a particular residence or business.
“If it's going to hit them in the pocketbook, that's the best way to enforce things,” he said.
