For decades, the basic configuration of structural firefighting protective clothing has been remarkably consistent. A coat and pants — each built around an outer shell, moisture barrier and thermal barrier — are worn with a hood, helmet, gloves, footwear and SCBA to create the familiar structural firefighting ensemble. That system has been refined repeatedly, and it has unquestionably provided firefighters with protection that earlier generations did not have.
The question now is not whether the traditional ensemble works for interior structural firefighting. It does. The more important question is whether the same configuration should continue to define what firefighter protective clothing must look like for the much broader range of work performed by the modern fire service.
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That question is at the center of the International Association of Fire Fighters’ PPE Reimagined program. The project has examined how firefighter missions, hazards, health concerns, standards, procurement practices and gear design have changed and, in some cases, failed to change together.
A Cornell University design study conducted as part of the effort provides a particularly useful way to see the problem. Rather than starting with the traditional coat-and-pant ensemble and asking how to improve it, the Cornell team asked a more fundamental question: What should firefighter protective clothing look like if it were designed around today’s missions and today’s understanding of firefighter health and performance?
Firefighting changed but the PPE did not
Structural fire suppression remains one of the defining missions of the fire service, but it is no longer the only mission and, for many departments, it is not even the most frequent one. Firefighters routinely respond to EMS incidents, vehicle crashes, technical rescues, hazmat events, wildland and wildland-urban interface fires, severe-weather events, battery incidents, investigations, public-assistance calls and prolonged operations where the hazards may differ substantially from an interior structure fire.
The Cornell progress report notes that turnout gear is increasingly used in technical rescue, disaster response, building collapse, wildfire and medical scenarios, while the equipment itself has become increasingly mature and increasingly constrained by accumulated requirements. The result is a protective system that can be extraordinarily capable in severe thermal environments, yet heavy, bulky, relatively impermeable and physiologically demanding when worn for other work.
Protective clothing can create hazards as well as control them. Thermal insulation, liquid barriers, reinforcements, overlaps and interface features all serve legitimate purposes, but each also adds weight, stiffness, bulk or resistance to heat and moisture transfer. More protection is not automatically better protection if the added protection is unnecessary for the mission and increases fatigue, heat strain or loss of mobility.
The IAFF PPE Reimagined project describes this as a need to realign PPE with mission, hazard and acceptable risk. In practical terms, that means first defining what firefighters are expected to do, then identifying the hazards, deciding what level of protection is actually needed, determining how that protection should be measured and only then deciding what clothing configuration can provide it. That is a very different sequence from starting with the existing turnout ensemble and simply adding another requirement to it.
Design requirements or design assumptions
One reason this discussion is difficult is that many requirements in today’s standards are so familiar that they can seem like immutable characteristics of firefighter PPE rather than design choices created at a particular point in time. The Cornell review identified several requirements inherited from NFPA 1971 and carried into the structural firefighting provisions of NFPA 1970 that can restrict alternative designs.
Among the examples are requirements that each structural firefighting garment include an outer shell, moisture barrier and thermal barrier; that garments be worn together continuously; and that the layers be attached. The report also points to prescriptive requirements affecting the drag rescue device, collar construction and height, retroreflective trim placement and inspection openings. Individually, each provision has a history and a safety rationale. Collectively, however, they tend to lock manufacturers into a recognizable garment architecture.
The issue is not that these features should simply be removed. Rather, the standard should ask whether the protective function can be achieved another way:
- If neck protection can be provided more effectively by an integrated hood and bib arrangement, must the coat still have the same traditional collar?
- If removable layers can be inspected directly, is a fixed inspection opening still necessary?
- If a certified system can provide different levels of protection by adding or removing a layer, must every protective function be permanently built into every garment at all times?
These questions are rooted in performance, not an attempt to weaken the standard. In fact, a more performance-based approach could require alternative designs to demonstrate equivalent or appropriate protection while allowing manufacturers to solve the problem differently.
What design freedom could look like
The design team developed an exploratory modular concept built around three main clothing elements:
- Improved station wear: The station-wear layer is intended to do more than serve as a uniform under turnout clothing. Cornell proposed a Nomex-knit base with strategically placed 3D spacer structures to improve moisture movement and evaporative cooling in areas affected by compression from the SCBA and clothing. The concept is intended to reduce cling, improve sweat evaporation and contribute to thermal comfort rather than making the underlayer a passive part of the system.
- Removable thermal-barrier top: This is perhaps the clearest departure from the conventional model. Instead of permanently carrying the same thermal insulation for every operation, the firefighter could add protection when the mission requires it. The concept is not that firefighters entering a structure fire would receive less protection. It is that firefighters performing lower-thermal-risk work would not necessarily have to carry the full thermal burden designed for an interior fire.
- Outer coverall: Moving away from separate coat and pants reduces one major interface at the waist, where garment overlap, SCBA straps, pockets, belts and movement all compete for space. Cornell’s report identifies possible benefits in reducing contamination gaps, simplifying interfaces and improving movement. The concept also exposed practical concerns - including how firefighters would manage the upper portion of the coverall when partially doffed - which is exactly why prototype development and field evaluation are essential.
Additional concepts include a redesigned hood and a modular waist storage strap.
The hood concept similarly illustrates the value of looking at the ensemble as a system. Cornell explored moving the protective collar function from the coat to the hood, allowing the hood to extend over the garment as a bib. The intent is to simplify neck protection, improve head movement and reduce the common conflict among collar, hood, helmet and SCBA facepiece. A separate waist storage strap was proposed to move tools and bailout equipment away from permanently sewn garment pockets and allow components to be cleaned, replaced or reconfigured more easily.
None of these ideas should be viewed as a finished product prescription. The Cornell report itself describes prototype work, manikin evaluation, human testing and additional construction as future steps. The significance of the concept is that it demonstrates how quickly different solutions appear once the designer is allowed to treat protection as a system rather than as a permanently fixed coat-and-pant construction.
Proposed changes to NFPA 1970
That same thinking has now been translated into a public input for updating NFPA 1970. Some public inputs propose that the standard permit structural firefighting protection to be achieved through system-based, modular or mission-adaptive configurations instead of requiring every protective function to be permanently incorporated in the traditional manner.
The proposal would allow combinations of garments and layers, removable or separately donned thermal and moisture barriers, multiple certified configurations for different threat levels, alternative collars and hood-based neck protection, modular storage systems and coverall or hybrid garment forms. Just as importantly, it would require clear labeling and user information for each certified configuration and would tie use to department hazard/risk assessment, SOPs and training.
It’s important to reiterate that mission-adaptive PPE cannot mean that individual firefighters casually decide how much protection they feel like wearing. A modular system has to be governed. Departments would need to define which configurations are permitted for which operations, how dispatch information affects selection, when the full structural configuration is mandatory, what happens when conditions change and how supervisors verify compliance. The more flexible the equipment becomes, the more disciplined the selection process must become.
Reconfiguration maintains protection
Any proposal to rethink turnout gear will understandably raise concern that the fire service is being asked to accept less protection. That is not the premise of PPE Reimagined, and it should not be the premise of standards reform. Interior structural firefighting still demands a high level of thermal, flame, physical and interface protection. The traditional ensemble may remain the most practical answer for that mission, or future systems may provide the same protection in a different form.
The real change is to stop treating the structural-fire configuration as the universal answer to every firefighter mission. In many situations, excess thermal insulation and barrier performance can impose a physiological cost without adding meaningful risk reduction. At the same time, some non-structural missions may require forms of protection that traditional turnout clothing does not address especially well, such as prolonged heat-stress management, contamination control, rapid doffing, mobility or easier cleaning.
A modern PPE strategy therefore may need more than one certified configuration. Think of it less as choosing between “turnouts” and “no turnouts” and more as establishing a protection continuum. A department could have a baseline all-hazards configuration, additional modules for increased thermal protection and a full structural firefighting configuration for interior operations. The exact categories still need research, validation and standardization, but the underlying logic better reflects how firefighters actually work.
Define protection without freezing the design
The IAFF PPE Reimagined project makes a broader point that PPE standards have often evolved by accumulation. New requirements are added to address newly recognized hazards or performance concerns, but the total system is not always reconsidered after those additions. Over time, the standard can begin to define the product rather than define the protection.
That is the central reason ensemble configuration and design criteria deserve another look. Prescriptive requirements are valuable when they prevent known failures, but they can become barriers when they prohibit alternative ways of achieving the same or better result. A mature standard should preserve the safety floor while making room for innovation above it.
The IAFF project summary points toward mission-adaptive categories, stronger measurement of physiological burden, better contamination-control metrics, greater lifecycle transparency and more comprehensive field trials before large-scale procurement. Those ideas recognize that protection is multidimensional. Thermal resistance is important, but so are mobility, fit, heat dissipation, cleanability, interface performance, durability and the ability of firefighters to wear the equipment correctly for the duration of an incident.
The next question
For many years, the dominant PPE design question has been: How much protection can we build into turnout gear? The modern fire service needs to add another question: What combination of protection and functionality best matches the mission firefighters are actually performing?
That does not diminish the importance of structural firefighting PPE. It places that equipment in the proper context — as one essential configuration within a larger protective system. The work sponsored by the IAFF through PPE Reimagined, including the Cornell University design study and the resulting NFPA public input, offers a credible starting point for that discussion.
Firefighter PPE has advanced most when the fire service has been willing to question assumptions that once seemed permanent. Positive-pressure SCBA, breathable moisture barriers, TPP, total heat loss and third-party certification all required changes in how protection was understood and measured. The next advance may not come from another fabric or another layer. It may come from reconsidering how the entire ensemble is configured, when each level of protection is needed and whether standards should permit more than one way to get there.
The goal should not be less protection. It should be the right protection, in the right configuration, for the right mission.
