KUALA LUMPUR: The campaign to educate students at schools and kindergartens in the city about the danger of making fake fire calls has been fruitful as the rate of hoax calls received by the Kuala Lumpur Fire and Rescue Department has shown a significant decrease over the past five years.
According to the recent statistics issued by the department, the number of hoax calls received had declined to only 12 as at May 2015 from 85 in 2011.
Kuala Lumpur Fire and Rescue director Khiruddin Drahman said the fire education campaign carried out at schools and kindergartens had indeed brought about positive impact to the extent of creating new awareness of the danger of making hoax calls among the children.
He said the hoax calls were usually made by children during school holiday, especially in November and December.
“I personally monitor the trend of these hoax calls from time to time.
“Normally, children stayed home most of the time during school holiday…so, when they don’t have anything to do, some of them will resort to making hoax calls to the fire department,” he told Bernama at his office here.
Khiruddin said each distress call received would be deemed ‘real’ and it was ‘compulsory’ for the department to respond accordingly before it was proven a hoax.
“However, since the introduction of the Malaysia Emergency Response Services (MERS) system, it had inadvertently helped the department to detect the location of the caller and his or her communication provider.
“For example, the moment we receive a distress call, the big screen at our call operation centre will show us the caller’s location and from there, we can detect whether it is a false call or not,” he said. — Bernama