Six fire engines, drones, a specialist climbing team, several police officers and a helicopter equipped with a thermal-imaging unit were scrambled to Blackpool Tower on Thursday after reports of a fire.
People were evacuated from their homes, streets cordoned off and witnesses spoke of chaos. But it was never a towering inferno, just orange netting blowing in the wind.
The incident is far from being the first emergency false alarm:
Police descended in numbers after reports in September of a ritual mass murder in Chapel St Leonards, Lincolnshire. It was, in fact, a yoga class at which the teacher Millie Laws had asked her students to relax and lie down with their eyes closed as she walked among them banging a drum.
Mystery still surrounds the spotting of the 2018 Gatwick drone that caused Christmas-cancelling mayhem. It closed the airport for two days leading to the cancellation of more than 1,000 flights and cost airlines £50m. Was it a terrorism plot? Was it just mass hysteria? After an 18-month investigation costing £800,000, the jury is still out.
Less mystery surrounds the Croydon cat killer, alleged to have dismembered and decapitated more than 400 cats in south London since 2014. After an investigation involving feline postmortems, forensic examinations, poring over CCTV and DNA testing, the Met concluded it was probably foxes.
In June this year the Met released audio of an emergency call from someone being followed in north London. “We are walking home and there is a cat following us,” the caller said. “It’s following us for a long time.” The Belsize Village business association later said the cat may have been one called Obama. “He does follow people but it is to say hello,” they insisted.
Hampshire police revealed some of the exasperating 999 calls it had received in 2023. They included finding a wallet, spotting a deer and asking for a 9.30am wake-up call in order to make a court appearance.
In a similar vein, the Welsh ambulance service revealed in February that a fifth of the 999 calls it was receiving were non-urgent. They included: “I can’t find my keys”; “I’m really worried about my ingrown toenail. It’s kind of getting a bit red”; and “I got hair dye in my eye … and it still hurts.”
Fire crews in Harrogate had two false alarms in one day this year. The first was caused by burnt toast and the second did involve ringing bells, just not the right ringing bells. “This was a false alarm,” the incident report said, “where an alarm clock had been mistaken for a fire alarm.”
