KINGSTON, Jamaica – The Jamaica Fire Brigade (JFB) is imploring persons to desist from making false bomb threats.

In late 2023, the JFB was bombarded by a series of bomb threats that were made to several schools, businesses and government institutions.

Commissioner of the JFB, Stewart Beckford, noted that, at this time, implementing measures to prevent bomb threats would be challenging.

“In relation to mitigation measures, I’m not sure what we can say to somebody, because it’s the same thing we’ve been doing for many years in terms of non-genuine, or regular false-alarm calls, where somebody just takes up the phone and just call and they see it as fun and as a joke,” Commissioner Beckford said.

He explained that although the pranksters see it as funny, the JFB is not laughing, as its team has been put in danger responding to these false calls.

“We are saying it’s not a joke thing for us. We have had in the past, fire trucks involved in accidents responding to false alarms. We have seen where a unit would have been dispatched to a false alarm, which we don’t know until we get there, because we don’t have the luxury of saying we suspect it is a false alarm. We have to treat every call as a genuine call,” he said.

“We have had instances where we would have sent a unit, probably the only unit at the station, get to a particular scene only to find out it’s a false alarm. But then there is an incident happening close to the fire station, an actual fire and it takes that unit maybe 10 minutes or 50 (minutes) to get back from where it went, to come back to this fire,” the Commissioner added.

He said in these instances, it is the true victims who suffer. “So, there is no possibility, highly unlikely, that we will be able to save that property, because once a fire gets going, it doubles in size every 10 minutes, and in some instances, it may be even quicker, depending on the fuel load that is in that property,” he said.

The Commissioner indicated that the calls only disrupt the operations of the fire service.

“These calls only serve one purpose – they’re very disruptive and they result, in most instances, in a waste of our resources that could be used for more productive purposes,” he added.

“We want to encourage members of the public to desist from this practice. We are hoping that the time will come when we will have the technology and the laws in place to be able to track these calls and make arrests and punish those who are doing this,” the Commissioner said.

Beckford also appealed to parents to monitor their children during the summer period, as this is when they are likely to make these false alarm calls.

-JIS