National Fire Authority (NFA) has raised its concern with the members of the public making malicious calls or prank calls to NFA.

Yesterday afternoon at 1728hrs, NFA received a call that there was a serious road accident at the roundabout in Cunningham between a bus and car and that there were people trapped as a result of the accident which required the road accident rescue assistance by NFA. Our brigade from Suva Fire Station responded, but there was no accident.

NFA chief executive officer John O’Connor is advising members of the public not to make malicious or prank calls.

The NFA CEO highlighted that yesterday afternoon’s malicious call resulted in two fire tenders being deployed to the site.

“To respond to such false fire calls is a very expensive exercise for NFA. Furthermore because the call came during the rush hour and the road to Nausori was really busy, NFA firefighters were putting at risk the life of the firefighters, but more importantly the life of the communities which is a serious concern for NFA.

Furthermore the ability of NFA to respond to other calls is affected when attending to such malicious calls.

“NFA is taking such malicious calls seriously and are conducting investigations to try and trace the call before officially reporting the matter to the Police for further investigation.

“We humbly request people to stop making prank calls and support NFA reduce the number of property fires in the country”, Mr O’Connor added.