Cranbury Fire Company struggles against flood of calls
By: Jessica Beym
Every time his pager for the Cranbury Fire Company goes off, Charlie Smith, a volunteer firefighter and self-employed plumber, stops what he’s doing and races to the firehouse on South Main Street.
And every time the fire company gets a call from one of the warehouses in the commercial district, it takes four or more volunteers, at least two trucks and up to an hour to respond to the call, even if it’s just a smoke detector going off.
But many of these calls have been false alarms from commercial businesses, many of which have not fixed faulty systems or others who fail to report a fire drill to the police dispatcher calls that Mayor Tom Panconi said are unnecessarily costing the all-volunteer squad time and money.
To address the problem the Township Committee said it would introduce an ordinance Monday that would impose a $250 fine on companies with alarm systems that have had three or more false alarms within a year.
Currently, the township allows six false alarms and thereafter issues a $100 fine.
"It’s the negligence that’s the problem," Mayor Panconi said, adding that the fire company recently responded to two false alarms within two days from the same business. He said the company failed to let the police know it would be testing the alarm system.
"These are companies that (testing the alarm systems) is what they do and they just get lazy and don’t bother calling," he said. "Then the fire company comes out and it’s a big deal because they have to stop what they’re doing. We’re not looking for money. We just want them to know that this problem is front and center for us because we don’t have guys just sitting at the firehouse all day and we don’t want guys just sitting at the firehouse."
Mayor Panconi, who meets with the fire company every month, said there have been 13 false alarms since February, none of which were for smoke detectors going off because of "careless cooking." The false alarms were due to either faulty electrical wiring of alarms that sounded off signals or companies that were testing the alarms and forgot to report it beforehand.
The monthly reports also show that the majority of the calls were between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. Although the fire company has 24 active volunteers, Mayor Panconi said, only about eight of them have jobs that allow them to respond during the day.
Three of the daytime responders are also township Public Works employees who are paid an extra dollar per hour from the township for their service to the Fire Department. The township reached out to the Public Works employees last year when it was struggling to find enough daytime volunteers.
The problem of false alarms isn’t a new one for the fire company, Mayor Panconi said.
A 1999 study of the fire company’s operation and equipment done by WC Peters Fire Apparatus Consulting Services, LLC revealed that malfunctioning automatic alarms accounted for 58 percent of annual calls, Mayor Panconi said. The report also credited those systems for saving lives and structures, despite their malfunctions.
"The biggest problem we face (is the number of false alarms) during the day and we’re trying to get a good response out," Mayor Panconi said. "They try to do the best they can and it’s been working well. But it is a problem in Cranbury to get people to volunteer. Eventually we don’t want to face this but we may have to have a paid company. The longer we can push that off, the better off we’ll be."
Mayor Panconi said the township hopes that the law change will send a message to the repeat offenders and ease the strain on the daytime volunteers who continue to deal with false alarms.

