Fire departments are handling more false alarms, so why isn’t there more concern?
Firefighters in Illinois responded to 17,437 more false alarms in 2024 than they did three years earlier when the Illinois State Fire Marshal first began tracking those figures.
But while some of those calls can be a nuisance to municipal fire departments or local fire protection districts, many suburban fire chiefs contend these types of calls can oftentimes be helpful.
“I’d rather the system let us know something’s wrong accidentally than it not work at all when we need it to,” said Arlington Heights Fire Chief Lance Harris. “Usually it’s letting the building owner know something needs fixing.”
The vast majority of false alarms aren’t malicious or pranks, but rather a warning that maintenance is required on the building’s alert or suppression system, fire officials said.
How fire agencies categorize what constitutes a false alarm varies among the departments, which can affect the data, officials said.
“It’s somewhat of a flawed system,” said Wheaton Fire Chief Robert Brill. “What we might consider a false alarm may not be coded the same way in another department.”
A new reporting system is expected to be implemented in 2026 and should make all fire and emergency response data more uniform statewide and nationally.
| Year | Total service calls | False alarms | % false alarms |
| 2024 | 1,547,328 | 146,649 | 9.5% |
| 2023 | 1,543,427 | 137,711 | 8.9% |
| 2022 | 1,437,766 | 131,475 | 9.1% |
| 2021 | 1,334,509 | 129,212 | 9.7% |
| Source: Illinois State Fire Marshal | |||
That’s just one of the reasons state fire marshal officials aren’t overly concerned about the 13.5% rise in false alarms between 2021 and 2024.
“The first thing I do is look at the percentages,” said Lee Buxton, fire service outreach coordinator at the fire marshal’s office. “I don’t see a big fluctuation in the percentages there.”
In fact, as false alarms have grown over the past four years, so have calls for service, which were up nearly 16% in 2024 from 2021. During those four years, false alarm calls made up anywhere from 8.9% to 9.7% of all fire agency service calls, records show.
Most suburban fire departments also report roughly 9% of their service calls are false alarms each year.
“The systems are mostly in businesses that are required to install them,” said Elgin Fire Chief Robb Cagann. “Most business owners are very responsive, but if there’s a problem with a system that creates a burden for the city, we have a fine system in place.”
Elgin, like most fire agencies, has a graduated fine system that begins with a grace period, usually two or three false alarms before the fines start getting levied.
“If we go more than three times, that’s when we start looking at fines,” said Wauconda Fire District Division Chief Mike DaValle. “We’ve never had to actually use it. (Business owners) want to fix it just as much as we want them to.”
Chief Harris in Arlington Heights said only about 5% to 6% of the roughly 1,000-plus false alarms each year in the village result in a fine.
“It’s not as if it’s a revenue stream,” he said. “And as soon as we send that first fine, they respond pretty quickly showing us the repairs have been made.”
Most fines start off at about $100 and then start doubling if repairs aren’t made and more false alarms happen.
Perhaps the biggest problem with false alarms though is that they pull resources away from actual emergencies.
“Just today we had a situation where we had a false alarm at a business and we had a vehicle accident at the same time,” Cagann said last week. “The fire engine that would have been first due to the auto accident was on this false alarm call.”
However, the chief noted that it’s not that uncommon of a scenario for his department to be working multiple calls at the same time. Often, all the calls they are working simultaneously are actual emergency calls.
That’s pretty standard throughout the suburbs, other chiefs agreed.
“I’d say about 35% of the time we’re on multiple calls,” DaValle said. “We’ve had some instances where one of the calls might be a false alarm and equipment we’d want elsewhere isn’t available, but nothing where we lost a building or something like that.”