Because of an increase in nonmalicious false fire calls, Harford County emergency operations officials will begin enforcing a county law designed to penalize users of malfunctioning automatic fire alarms.
James W. Terrell, chief of the county's Emergency Operations Center, said more than 90 percent of the 1,740 fire calls coming from automatic systems in the past five years were not emergencies.
Automatic systems are those containing smoke detectors, heat sensors or sprinklers that sense fire, smoke or flowing water and activate a direct-dial telephone to a monitoring company that immediately alerts dispatchers at fire headquarters.
Alarms from automatic systems in Harford have risen from about 5.5 percent of all fire calls from 1990 to 1993 to 11 percent last month.
County volunteer firefighters made nearly 500 unnecessary runs last year because of automatic alarms that malfunctioned or were accidentally activated.
"Anyone can forget to shut off an automatic alarm, or accidentally set one off," said Richard A. Woodward, chief of the Bel Air company. "We're after the chronic abuser, especially those service companies that fail to notify us when they are working on a system."
Repeat offenders will be cited for three or more false alarms occurring within 30 days, or five or more within a 12-month period. Violators will incur a $50 fine for a first offense and $100 for each subsequent offense.
Citations also may be issued for defective systems. The user would be required to have its alarm systems inspected. Continued use of a defective system could result in a $200 fine for each offense.
The recent increase in malfunctioning systems puzzles Harford authorities, since such unnecessary calls have declined by as much as 50 percent in some counties since state legislators established civil penalties for chronic offenders in 1992.
Automatic alarm calls must be considered true emergencies, even when as many as 50 residential and commercial alarms sound during a brief but severe electrical storm.
The Bel Air company, the busiest in the county with 1,371 calls for fire service in 1994, had 19 false alarms last month, Chief Woodward said.
Each response, he said, cost an average of $160 and required nine man-hours of volunteer time.
By comparison, Lt. Richard DeFlavis, acting captain of Baltimore County's Fire Marshal's Office, said false alarms in Baltimore County have declined to an average of 30 a month, down from 75 a month in 1993, when his office began enforcing the state law by issuing $30 citations for each offense beyond four in a month or eight in a year.