Firefighter Safety
Fireground safety, incident management, rescue operations and line-of-duty risk.
Firefighter Cancer Presumption Laws Are Not a Silver Bullet
Firefighters will very well find themselves in the same position in the future as a growing number of firefighters develop cancer from doing their job will find themselves being crushed financially paying for cancer-related treatment and cancer-related deaths prompted by firefighter cancer presumption laws. When that happens, we should not be surprised when efforts begin to reduce or even dissolve the social compromise between firefighters in those governments.
Cleaning Your SCBA: Are You a Caveman or a Transformer?
During these types of events, and particularly during interior structural firefighting, the SCBA unit can be exposed to a toxic “soup” of chemicals, chemical compounds, and known carcinogens while it protects the firefighter’s respiratory system from those same hazards. And while much is currently being discussed and written about how to protect firefighters from those hazards, there is much to be learned about how to keep SCBA units clean and decontaminated after each use and ready for the next emergency.
Firefighters need PPE options
Firefighters need to have PPE options that more closely align with the tactical operations that they do beside just structural firefighting. No longer can structural PPE be the “one size fits all” option.
Some Winter Weather Posts to Get You and Your Department Through to Spring!
Here are a few of my posts from the past on the topic of winter weather and fire department operations that have appeared on FireRescue1.com. I hope that you find the material useful during the next month of so. Because, after all we're only halfway through meteorological winter (January through March) here in North America!
It’s Time to Limit Wearing of Firefighting Turnout Gear
Everybody is now starting to say, “Treat every structure fire like a hazmat incident” (Something I’ve been saying and writing about for about four or five years now). Well, do you ever see a hazmat team member wearing a Level A (fully encapsulated) protective suit unless they're working on an incident or training? No, you don't! And it's time every firefighter starts looking at their structural PPE the same way!
What are the rules of interior structural firefighting?
Look, I’ve made this connection between the HAZWOPER standard and interior structural firefighting with about an hour’s worth of research. How long do you think it’s going to take for an attorney—and their legal team—representing a firefighter who’s developed cancer on the job to develop a solid case that their client’s cancer was caused by the inappropriate PPE and unnecessary exposure to toxic chemicals, chemical compounds, and carcinogens?
A new structure fire response paradigm
We now know enough about the connection between firefighter exposures to the toxic chemicals, chemical compounds, and carcinogens present in today's smoke encountered during interior structural firefighting to know that it is not right to continue putting firefighters into that environment.
Why interior firefighting will be obsolete by 2030
We've only seen the beginning of the firefighters developing cancer from their occupational exposures. The numbers for those cases are going to skyrocket in the next 10 years; and along with the number of cases will be an even more daunting rise in health care premiums (That many localities still pay for their firefighters) and workers compensation claims being paid by local and state governments.
Climate change ain’t no hoax, just ask a California firefighter
As taxpaying citizens of the U.S., we all have “skin in the game” when it comes to how wildfires and all natural disasters in the U.S. are prepared for and handled when they happen. And if we don’t take climate change seriously and pressure our elected officials to take it seriously, we’ll only see more acres burn. We’ll only see bigger and stronger storms—from hurricanes to tornadoes to winter storms—affecting all parts of the U.S. And don’t even get me started on coastal areas that will become non-existent for future generations.
Firefighter Gets Fitted for Hearing Aid
My hearing loss is for certain sounds in the high frequency range of speech; for me those sounds are predominantly th, s, f, and ch. Who knew that the sounds for different letters and letter combinations come out of our mouths at different frequencies? Did you?
The Coming Firefighter Cancer Tsunami
The firefighter diagnosed with colon cancer today may have first been exposed 15 to 20 years ago (1998 to 2003). What did we know then? How well were we protecting ourselves then? These are questions that should be scaring the hell out of firefighters. They do me because my career spanned the years 1982 to 2007!
Fire retardants and their impact on firefighter health
Until I went the following year to a specialist who understood autoimmune issues and said that the previous tests were incomplete as most docs do not understand how to test for the full thyroid spectrum. My former male fire officer [with Aurora Fire Department] also has Hashimoto's (though it’s much more common in women) and I know women firefighters that have had thyroid cancer as well as Sjogren's syndrome—a really terrible autoimmune disease, worse than Hashimoto's.