Early in my career in the 1980s, we responded to a motor home on fire inside a detached garage. The fire was intense, resulting in a complete loss of the vehicle and most of the structure. As I lumbered around inside the building doing overhaul and extinguishing hot spots, dressed in full bunker gear and with my airpack on, I glanced over at my captain who was working across from me. His bunker coat was open over his station uniform and he was holding a hoseline barehanded. He was also smoking a cigarette.
Such a contrast was not unusual back then, but over the subsequent decades, things changed in structural firefighting. The use of SCBA became standard rather than optional. Day boots were consigned to the ash heap of history. Smoking, once commonplace and desirable among firefighters — “It toughens up your lungs,” I was told — became forbidden. People even started showering and cleaning their gear after bad calls.
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These changes did not happen all at once and they did not happen based on only one cause. There were many factors: research proving specific detrimental effects from exposures, societal disapproval of smoking, improvements in gear design, specific data collection, laws that allowed for presumptive cause for cancer and other diseases based on occupation. Today, structural firefighters are much better protected against job hazards than they were a few decades ago, and statistics show that these changes have led to healthier outcomes for those who do this job.
The same is not true for wildland firefighters.
Resistance to change
Wildland firefighters still mostly function as they did 40 years ago, living and working for days and weeks in heavy smoke conditions, using only bandannas for breathing protection while battling wildfires. And the effects are clear: Wildland firefighters are getting sick and dying young from these conditions.
A recent New York Times investigative report points to factors that contribute to the health hazards wildland firefighters face. Deployments are longer and more frequent. Fires tend to burn closer to populated areas and include plastics and other hazardous materials, not just forest products. And, perhaps most importantly, wildland firefighters still rarely use any kind of breathing protection beyond a cloth bandanna while working a fire.
It’s not that wildland firefighters are unaware of the risk. After the devastating fires in Yellowstone National Park in 1988, thousands of firefighters developed breathing problems. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) sent researchers to investigate. They found that crews were breathing a mix of carcinogens and other harmful chemicals as they battled the fires. The CDC advised the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) to ban bandannas, which they concluded “offered no degree of protection.” Instead, the investigators recommended that they equip crews with respirator masks.
It never happened. Not in 1988, when the USFS rejected the conclusions and called for more studies, and not in 2024, when those subsequent studies came to the same conclusion.
There are several reasons why masks and wildland firefighting may not seem like the best fit. Masks are bulky and hot — all firefighters know this. It may feel like they slow you down. The USFS concluded that firefighters could suffer the risk of overheating if wearing masks, although this has not been shown to be a problem in other countries that do require masks for wildland firefighters. Additionally, providing masks would cost money for agencies already operating on thin margins, and one internal report stated that they could lead to a 20% work reduction. Finally, there is a cultural barrier to masks for wildland firefighters, as there was in the past for structural firefighters as well.
But the effects of breathing smoke in all its forms for days and weeks are undeniable. Wildland firefighters are developing cancer, COPD and other serious or terminal illnesses because of their work history.
Decades of hurdles
One problem with addressing this issue is the lack of data. Only since 2023 has data been formally collected related to long-term health outcomes for wildland firefighters. Nearly 5,000 wildland firefighters signed up to be part of a study mandated by Congress that year. However, layoffs within the CDC have disrupted that effort.
Another major stumbling block for mandating masks for wildland firefighters is the absence of good options for equipment. Respirator masks intended for short-term use by contractors are inconvenient, hot and not well suited to use for many hours at a time. Disposable N95 masks that were used during the COVID-19 pandemic have some beneficial effect but are likewise often ill-fitting and uncomfortable. But if large agencies like the USFS made it clear they were looking to purchase mass quantities of a product specifically designed for them, the market would likely respond.
Then it would just be a matter of getting wildland firefighters to use the masks. Going against generations of culture and practice is always difficult, but structural firefighting has proven that it can be done. All fire agencies owe it to their members to be clear about the risks they face and offer them the best safety equipment possible. And they must also work with leaders among those crews to make sure that people actually use it.
