MALICIOUS hoax calling of emergency services is wasting precious time for those in real danger, local bosses have said.

Yesterday we reported that Wiltshire Police received more than 420 hoax calls from the Swindon area.

And now we can reveal that firefighters were called out to double the amount of hoax calls last year than the previous year, while Great Western Ambulance Service faced more than 400 hoax calls – a slight decline on 2009.

Figures obtained by the Adver through requests under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 show that during the period of January 1 to November 17 last year, fire crews in Swindon attended 73 incidents which turned out to be hoax calls and challenged a further 192, which resulted in non-attendance.

Meanwhile, paramedics responded to 403 hoax calls across their coverage area between January 1, 2010 and November 30, compared with the average 458 calls received from the Swindon area every week.

Glyn Moody, station manager at Drove Road fire station, said: “Where our guys are responding to these calls they are not available for genuine incidents. We will obviously still respond to genuine calls but there may be a delay.”

The figures for Wiltshire Fire and Rescue service are up on 2009, with 38 attended hoax calls and 83 unattended, while only 2008 recorded a higher number in total with 181, of which 61 were attended by crews.

As of mid-November 2010 the average time taken to arrive at an incident following an emergency call into fire control, in Devizes, was eight-and-a-half minutes, which means 10 hours and 20 minutes was wasted just arriving at hoax incidents. According to the information provided to the Adver most of the hoax calls are the result of automatic fire alarms, followed closely by supposed structural fires.

Mr Moody said many of those calls attended were unavoidable as crews had to respond to automatic alarms.

“The majority of the 73 we would have attended will come through malicious breakage of call points,” he said.

“There is no way our control room staff can stop that occurring as we have to respond to those and would only find out they are malicious once we had got there.

“But I would think if you took out those that aren’t automatic there would be a very minimal number of hoaxes through the phone system. That is reflected in the 192 that were challenged by control centre staff and we did not attend.”

On average Wiltshire Fire and Rescue receive 250 emergency calls a week, with 71 of those coming from the Swindon area.

Melanie Glanville, who was a manager in GWAS‘s control room for ten years, said: “Hoax calls are thankfully a very small number of the total 999 calls we take.

“Unlike the other emergency services we tend to suffer more with inappropriate 999 calls either because people don’t know who else to call or due to patients suffering mental illnesses, most of the time these calls are made with good intent but the patients would be better served by other healthcare areas.

“Within our emergency operations centre (EOC) we have a clinical desk staffed by nurses, senior paramedics and emergency care practitioners and part of their role is to assist these callers in finding other more appropriate and effective care pathways. Malicious hoax calls – calls to fake incidents – waste valuable resources and the time of skilled members of EOC and road staff. They can also potentially put lives at risk.”