BURNT toast is causing issues for firefighters in the Borders, it has emerged.

A Scottish Fire and Rescue Service (SFRS) report is due to be discussed at a council board meeting on Wednesday (December 14).

A section on Unwanted Fire Alarm Signals (UFAS) – or false alarms – is contained within the papers.

And it shows that between April and September there were 74 call-outs due to burnt toast.

“There have been 535 fire calls that were classed as UFAS in the Scottish Borders during the reporting period,” the report stated. “On average SFRS sends nine firefighters and two fire appliances to every UFAS call-out.

“It takes around 15 minutes for firefighters to investigate the cause, from the appliance leaving the station to the cause of the alarm being identified. This means every year SFRS loses over 64,000 productive hours.

“To put this into context, that’s the equivalent cost of £3.5 million. This causes significant disruption to our training, fire safety and community safety work but crucially, while firefighters are investigating the cause of the alarm, they cannot attend real emergencies.”

UFAS are defined as incidents where an automated fire alarm system activates and results in the mobilisation of SFRS resources, when the reason for that alarm turns out to be something other than a fire emergency.

While burnt toast makes up the largest proportion of call-outs given in the report, 72 were due to faulty equipment and 42 were caused by apparatus.

Thirty-two of the calls were caused by staff testing alarms which ‘could have been prevented by staff knowing their own procedure and practice within their workplace’.

During the six-month period false alarms accounted for 57 per cent of emergency calls, according to the report.

The service will change how it approaches workplace automatic fire alarms from April next year, including ‘call challenging’ any from non-domestic properties.

The change will not impact how the SFRS responds to alarms in private homes.

The report also shows a large increase in the number of deliberate fires in the Borders between April and September.

But the figure of 90 incidents – up from 59 – is in line with previous years before COVID and its associated lockdowns.