While the rate of on-duty injuries to American firefighters has fallen, there were still 53,575 municipal firefighters hurt in the line of duty in 2024, according to the National Fire Protection Association’s official count.
The greatest portion of those injuries — roughly 30% — occurred on the fireground. The leading injury types were the familiar strains, sprains and musculoskeletal injuries (43%); wounds, cuts and bruises (14%); and smoke and gas inhalation (8%).
Bangs and bumps on suppression scenes may always be an inevitable part of firefighters’ jobs. But smoke inhalation — which in raw numbers impacted around 1,300 firefighters in 2024 — is a danger departments spend a lot of time, money and effort guarding against. Exposures most commonly happen when respiratory protection is absent, interrupted or exhausted while the wearer’s in a contaminated atmosphere. Air supplies may deplete when firefighters penetrate too deeply, misjudge their exit time, become delayed or miss or work through low-air alarms.
At the command level, a lack of situational awareness can exacerbate these situations. The most important information on the fireground may be difficult for commanders to see in real time: Who’s still on air? Who’s low? Who’s in alarm? Which crew member needs attention now?
But can awareness of approaching trouble occur before an actual mayday?
Life-support data is shared with command
“When you’re operating on a scene in a critical environment, you have to make informed decisions quickly,” said John Reid, MSA’s assistant segment marketing manager for the fire service. “Fires are so much faster and stronger than they were in the past. Our tools really can help departments with that.”
MSA
The gap between command and critical information about firefighters’ statuses is one that’s being addressed by MSA as part of its longstanding commitment to enhance firefighter safety. Its FireGrid Incident Command API is a secure cloud connection that lets critical data from the company’s G1 SCBA flow securely in real time into users’ approved incident command platform of choice. This transforms the G1 from an individual monitoring tool into a component of a broader command and safety ecosystem.
“From a technology perspective, just getting the data from the devices to incident command has been a challenge,” said Selma Sosic, global product line manager for MSA’s fire service technology partnerships. “Now we have the right technology to transmit that data, and we can organize it the way people want to see it in the software platforms they’re already using. Every department does SOPs a bit differently, so we do our best to show the data in a way that’s both very straightforward and can also be customizable if you want to regroup individuals into teams or look at the data in different ways, for example. We do our best to accommodate all our departments.”
As firefighters work, the G1 tracks core life-support data such as air pressure; motion, manual and hardware alarms; and time-remaining information. Enabled by the FireGrid Incident Command API, data is transmitted wirelessly through the MSA HUB, along with firefighter and SCBA identifiers, to the FireGrid cloud and then on to approved IC platforms. These include popular industry platforms from First Due, Versaterm/Adashi, Systems Definition Inc. (SDI) and 3AM.
Why today’s victims have less time
Fires today are burning hotter and faster. Synthetic materials used in modern homes and furnishings have dramatically reduced the time available to rescue victims. Departments are often short-staffed, with crews stretched thinner. The suppression environment, in short, is in many ways more dangerous. But technology is advancing too, and optimizing the flow of data and ability to act on it early can bolster safety where it might be compromised.
The G1 SCBA, FireGrid software, MSA HUB and LUNAR Connected Device are all components of MSA’s Connected Firefighter platform, a fireground safety and accountability system consisting of connected devices and software that link firefighters and data from their life-support equipment to command in real time. The platform represents a response to the changing nature of firefighting.
“When you’re operating on a scene in a critical environment, you have to make informed decisions quickly,” said John Reid, MSA’s assistant segment marketing manager for the fire service. “Fires are so much faster and stronger than they were in the past. Our tools really can help departments with that.”
The G1 SCBA provides key data such as battery life, air pressure and estimated time remaining, and, when paired with LUNAR, additional elements such as air status, search status and alarm information.
LUNAR is a handheld wireless safety/search device carried by firefighters. It creates a network that shares alarm signals among firefighters and starts searching automatically when one occurs.
“Our LUNAR device was essentially developed to solve one main problem: How do you find a firefighter if something critical happens and they go down?” said Sosic. “It will essentially propagate distance and directional information for you to find that downed firefighter.”
The command-and-monitoring software layer in the equation is FireGrid. It’s a suite of several applications; FireGrid Monitor is the incident command module that receives the live data from connected devices for display on the department’s approved incident command platform.
With the launch of the API, departments are also looking at a variety of new software tools from which data may now potentially be integrated for a more streamlined incident command experience.
The MSA HUB provides a wireless gateway to the cloud, enabling wireless local monitoring and post-incident reporting. “It’s hard-mounted into a vehicle and communicates with G1s that have telemetry enabled, sending information to the cloud for on-scene decision-making as well as storing it for reporting,” said Reid. “It’s really useful to get that reporting afterward to accurately see what happened on the scene in order to help improve operations, training and equipment management.”
“These products are connected as soon as we turn them on, and they’ll essentially let the cloud know to start recording,” Sosic added. “So if a firefighter goes into a certain type of alarm and another firefighter searches for them, we’re able to log that. Data helps generate this report over time, so instead of having subjective reports after an incident, you have this objective, data-backed information you can use to supplement the reporting departments are already doing.”
‘This is a big leap’
The initial lineup of command platforms compatible with MSA’s FireGrid Incident Command API grew from department requests. “We wanted to make sure we accommodated a breadth of solutions,” said Sosic. The list is expected to grow. With the launch of the API, Sosic adds, departments are also looking at a variety of new software tools from which data may now potentially be integrated for a more streamlined incident command experience.
“This is a big leap for us on the fire service technology side, because there are a lot of really good companies developing technologies out there,” Sosic said. “This is an opportunity to bring them all together, look at the data and derive additional insights from those aggregated data points. It’s an opportunity to work with these companies to make sure we give fire departments the information they need to help make their members safer. I think that’s something new and drastically different from individual companies owning their own components and acting independently. It’s exciting for departments — and aligns with our mission to deliver technologically advanced safety solutions that address real-world problems.”
For more information, visit MSA.
