Ha, in the US but I had an issue with my chimney where there a strong smoke smell in the basement and an inexplicable hot spot on the back of my fireplace (no fire had been lit recently, and what creosote there was wasn't ignited). Not knowing what else to do, I called the fire deparment's non-emergency line and explained the situation.

They sent THREE full fire engines with sirens blaring and like 30 guys in full gear to my house, chief came out too. All to smash out the back of the fireplace and dispose of some smoldering embers that had collected behind it.

Seemed like an overreaction, now I'm wondering if they were just bored and decided to use me as a training exercise. Granted I'm also just some goober on the phone, they're under no obligation to assume I've reasonably assessed the situation.

Re the "fire": Turns out the original builders of my chimney skimped on bricks, and left a gap between the back of the fireplace and the exterior wall that shouldn't have been there. We were using the fireplace on the weekends, so some embers that cooled on their way up the chimney and fell back down collected in the gap, and decided to cook off a couple of days later. Weather was getting warmer, so instead of going up the chimney the resulting smoke down-drafted back into the house.

> now I'm wondering if they were just bored and decided to use me as a training exercise

If there isn't anything else going on, the opportunity cost of sending more people to your thing is very low and the risk that it wasn't actually a small issue can become much larger.

My aunt had a small kitchen fire. She called 911 and asked "Could you send a firefighter with an extinguisher, please?"

The 911 operator responded "Honey, we only send them one way."

And like a dozen guys showed up.

It might seem like an overreaction when you only think about a possible fire. While their larger concern was probably the possibly imminent CO poisoning!

Probably just regular ol' overtime abuse.