A FIRE STATION AT KALPANA SQUARE IN BHUBANESWAR. PICTURE BY ASHWINEE PATILELIN KUMAR MALLICK

Bhubaneswar, April 6: Firemen geared with their equipment rushed to Regional Institute of Education premises on Thursday as soon as they learnt that fire had gutted a house in the area. But after reaching the spot, the men were unable to trace any sign of smoke.

A man, identified as Bikash Patnaik, had called the fire station on the toll free number (101) and given out this information. However, when the firemen called the number back , they were showered with abuse.

Over a 1,000 emergency calls are made to fire stations in Bhubaneswar daily, but not even half the number is genuine.The fire station at Kalpana Square in the city receives around 1,000 calls every day, but out of those only around 20 are genuine, the rest are hoax. The fire control room today received 242 calls but only two were found to be genuine.

A month ago one person called the fire control room and informed them about a fire near Badagada. The fire brigade searched for the spot but after toiling for an hour, the firemen were convinced that it was a hoax call and returned back to their fire station. Apart from hoax calls, abusive calls are also rampant.

“We have been receiving around 50 calls since last three days from three mobile numbers. They use all sorts of abusive language and keep on shouting at us even though we inform them that the number is an emergency one for fire control,” said an official at the fire control room.

The number of such calls is between six and 10 in the morning and 10 and 12 late in the evenings. Girls also make hoax calls frequently along with children asking for chocolates. At present, the control room has four telephone lines for callers asking for emergency help. Sources at the control room said last year they had received around 1,400 calls out of which only 10 were genuine. At times, people also make calls from Puri, Khurda, Nayagarh and Jajpur districts.

The capital has three fire stations at Chandrasekharpur, Kalpana Square and Baramunda. Fire brigade officials blame the mobile operators for providing SIM cards without proper documents. They say, this is the reason behind the police being unable to trace such callers.

“Annoyed by the number of hoax calls received on a daily basis, we have decided to make a list of callers who make such calls frequently. We will inform the police then,” said another senior official.

Assistant fire officer B.B. Das said: “These hoax calls create a lot of difficulty. One team rushing to a particular spot means we are already short of a few firemen. In case of fire at any other place at the same time, we are short of equipment and manpower.”

“The control room should be modernised and these calls can be subsided by the use of General Packet Radio Service,” said Das.

Earlier, the city police also used to receive bogus calls. However, now the inflow of such calls had reduced after installation of the latest gadgets at the police control room to track bogus callers.