By Scott Ziegler
Since the internet firefighters of the world flipped out about my “Salty Lid” article, I figured I would come back to the subject.
Based on the comments, social media posts and another article that twisted my words — and added to them — I see three things:
1. A lot of you don’t actually read articles before you freak out.
2. If you do read them and they aren’t exactly in line with your opinion, you disregard what the writer is actually saying.
3. The fire service is soft as a whole and has forgotten how to take the occasional joke.
Let’s get one huge thing straight right off the bat so you can all dry your tears. Cancer is a huge issue among our profession. I take it very seriously and I think we all should, especially those of us who respond to a high volume of working fires.
I think it is important to clean our gear whenever possible and take other precautions like taking showers or wiping our faces right after fires. In fact, I said this in so many words in my last article, believe it or not.
My message in the first article was that the fire service seems to want to demonize those of us whose helmets look “salty,” and I think that’s irresponsible. That’s it. I point out that the condition of the outer shell of my helmet is not what’s giving us cancer. Because it’s not.
Maybe I should have spelled it out a little better for all of you children out there. Our helmets are burnt. The soot and discoloration is BURNT onto them.
What I do know is that 99 percent of the guys whose helmets look that way can’t clean away that look if they tried, and most certainly can’t afford to buy a new one every time it happens. Cleaning the liners of your helmet would go along with cleaning the rest of your gear.
When you have people in our profession making pictures and posts on social media about burnt up helmets and how they correlate to cancer, it sends a terrible message to the families of guys who happen to have said “salty” helmets. That was it.
Do I personally believe that that type of attitude about “salty lids” might stem from a bit of jealousy? Yes, I do. Do I think that the way your helmet looks is the way to tell a good firefighter from a bad one? No. Did I make a few jokes or jabs to this effect in my first article about this? You betcha.
What is salty? What does that even mean? To me the term is more of a joke. Having a dirty helmet or gear does not truly mark anyone’s accomplishments. But there is some degree of envy/admiration for the old “salty dog” on the job whose gear looks the way it does because he has been through a hell of a lot more fire than you have. And there isn’t anything wrong with that. It is not an insecurity.
However, I do agree that there are many more things that factor into judging what a good firefighter is. And just like the color or “saltiness” of his/her helmet is not a true testament to his/her abilities on the fire ground, the “saltiness” of his/her helmet should not say, “Look at me, I am an idiot who is asking for cancer.”
We have a dirty job. And it is getting worse. It seems every day we find something new that causes cancer. It gets on our gear and absorbs into our skin. You will never hear me discredit that. I will say it again, we should be washing our equipment whenever possible. But even with washing it, some of us are still going to have that dreaded salty lid even after we’ve cleaned off all of our stuff. My point was for people to realize that, and stop trying to make us look like assholes. We do not think we are immune. And we all know the effects of cancer.
My grandfather died of cancer. My stepmother was diagnosed three weeks ago. A good friend and fellow firefighter fought and beat it. I get it, guys. Cancer has touched my life as well. It sucks and I do not think it is a joke, though there are a lot of things we as firefighters joke about that aren’t really that funny. It is how we cope.
You want to know what is sad? I wrote an article with a flashy title about salty lids and cancer and it got over 50,000 views in a few days. I wrote one with a flashy title about lowering the number of cardiac-related deaths in the fire service, and I got crickets. Something we have much more control over, but would take a lot more physical effort on our parts, and no one wants to talk about it. Why is that?
Stay safe guys.
