KLIMAWIRE | Firefighter Matt Alba was having flashbacks. Watching videos of wind-fueled fires burning in Los Angeles triggered memories of battling the Camp Fire six years ago.
He spent 11 days in a fiery inferno called Paradise, in November 2018 the Californian town was burned by fires. More than 18,000 buildings were reduced to ashes. Alba had no lung protection for most of the time. But there was sickness in the smoke. He inhaled a toxic vortex of chemicals released from heavy metals and carcinogens as houses and cars burned. They can damage the brain.
He remembers smelling a smoldering tree stump in a burning mobile home park. It smelled sour and unnatural.
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“I turned to my crew and said, ‘Oh, man, I took five years off my life with that breather,'” he recalled in an interview. “And that was before he came down with brain cancer.”
Cancer is the number one cause of death among firefighters. Now, crews fighting fires in Los Angeles are once again inhaling cancer-causing chemicals without proper respiratory protection. It highlights how communities are unprepared for the changing nature of fires. As global warming dries out vegetation and prioritizes burning the landscape, fires are increasingly moving toward storm-swept urban areas, where they can release more harmful chemicals.
And the firefighters are surrounded by poisonous smoke.
Lack of breathing protection is a problem that has been affecting the health of forest firefighters for years. Despite renewed efforts after the campfire, there are still no portable respirators on the market that are capable of filtering all the chemicals released by structure fires and that last long enough for long shifts by wildland firefighters.
“In 2018, we said over and over again that this is unprecedented, and now we’re using the same word to talk about these new fires,” Alba said. “But we should have seen it coming.”
Not so ‘wild’ fires
Firefighters fighting fires in Los Angeles have been issued N95 masks and specialized respirators attached to oxygen tanks. It’s up to them whether they use them or not, Los Angeles County spokeswoman Edith Lai said.
Masks with oxygen tanks, known as SCBA, are commonly used by city firefighters to protect against the dangerous combination of falling oxygen levels and rising carbon monoxide. They also block the inhalation of toxic fumes, but they only last 30 to 45 minutes and can weigh up to 40 pounds. They are not designed for continuous toxic exposures from fires, as in Los Angeles.
N95 masks are also not a viable alternative, said Joe Ten Eyck, wildfire training coordinator for the International Association of Fire Fighters union. They protect against some particulate pollution, but they cannot filter out carcinogenic gases, such as polyaromatic hydrocarbons and dioxins, both of which are emitted by structural fires. N95 masks only stop 11 to 15 percent of these chemicals, Ten Eyck said. They also restrict breathing in potentially dangerous ways when fighting fires.
“Firefighters on the line doing structure defense, perimeter control in Los Angeles right now where the smoke is at its absolute worst, and the protection levels are not where we want or need them to be.” he said
Forest fires have historically burned vegetation. This smoke can also be dangerous to inhale because it contains small particles that clog the respiratory system, exacerbating asthma and other conditions. But greater development in previously rural areas means wildfires are increasingly occurring in urban spaces, burning more structures and releasing more chemicals.
Fires destroyed about 7,180 structures in California between 2004 and 2014. according to state data. Then the number exploded. In the past decade, fires burned nearly 54,700 structures. More than 18,800 of them were destroyed in a single fire, the Camp Fire.
As more structures burn, firefighters are exposed to more chemicals, and more cancer.
“Plumbing has copper and lead. Paint contains toxic chemicals. Electronics, plastics have very nasty stuff. These chemicals that we don’t think happen in a forest fire are now part of the smoke,” said Mary Johnson, lead researcher at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health. “The list is very long, and it’s really not good.”
Urban fires already had the problem of cancer. About 70 percent of fire service line-of-duty deaths were due to cancer in 2016, according to federal data. In 2022, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer reached far classify firefighting itself as a “human carcinogen” due to the high volume of chemicals found at work.
‘carcinogenic’ work
Firefighters also find carcinogens in the foam they use to extinguish flames, and as well as some of their protective equipment. The International Association of Fire Fighters says so using SCBA respirators It is “the most protected voluntary activity a firefighter can do.”
But they are not usually available to wildland firefighters. Instead, they rely on neck gaiters or scarves to try to limit smoke inhalation. Even if SCBA is available, their weight and short duration make them impractical for firefighting, when firefighters are often fighting fires for 10 to 24 hours at a time.
“Forest firefighters have suffered a lot the same Respiratory Hazards Avoided by Structural Firefighters Using Self-Contained Breathing Apparatus,” warns the US Department of Homeland Security.
The campfire was a turning point. But efforts to protect firefighters have been slow.
After the 2018 fire, DHS said, “many wildland firefighters reached the limit of respiratory damage” and retired.
The firefighters who fought the Camp Fire have it higher concentration of toxins in the bloodAccording to a study commissioned by the San Francisco Firefighter Cancer Prevention Foundation. In that project, blood tests were performed on 80 firefighters a few hours after they were deployed to fight the Camp Fire. Their blood carried carcinogenic flame retardants commonly found in plastics, electronics, foam and furniture at higher levels than the general population. They also had high levels of PFAS, a carcinogen and endocrine disruptor, and some firefighters also had higher levels of mercury and lead.
“No effective devices available”
After the camp fire, DHS made grants available for the development of fire-fighting respirators. They should be light, portable, durable and easy to wear when digging trenches, for example.
But progress has been slow.
“There is currently no effective device available on the market that is validated for operation in smoke and is durable enough to stand up to the conditions faced by firefighters at these incidents and is practical to use given its size and weight,” Mike Wilson. , a senior safety engineer from California, said in a presentation at the California Council of Industrial Hygiene Annual Meeting last month.
One grant-winning prototype is a hip-mounted air-purifying respirator from TDA research. It uses a fan to blow air through layers of HEPA filters to remove toxins before firefighters inhale them.
It has been tested in training exercises by CalFire and the Los Angeles Fire Department, but mass production is still at least two years away, said Drew Galloway, the engineer who designed the device.
He remembers meeting the parents of a firefighter who had been stationed at Camp for two weeks. It was his first fire, and it damaged his lungs so much that he had to retire.
“It’s almost like instant black lung,” Galloway said. “That’s the biggest threat to wildland firefighters, you have to keep these carcinogenic particles out of their system.”
The California Occupational Safety and Health Administration has also tried to address the problem. The state issued a general wildfire smoke safety rule in 2020 that required employers to provide masks to outdoor workers when air quality rises above certain thresholds, but exempted wildland firefighters. Two years later, the agency published a draft rule to protect wildland firefighters. Galloway would ask to be given the portable respirators he is developing.
But the rule isn’t finished, partly because the technology isn’t ready. The agency, which has worked with TDA Research to test its prototype, said it expects the rule to be finalized in 2026.
“Protecting firefighters from severe smoke exposure when deployed to fight large wildfires in the state forest and urban interface is one of Cal/OSHA’s highest priorities for firefighter safety and health,” agency spokeswoman Denisse Gomez said.
It’s hard to wait for Alba, 47, who is a battalion chief in the San Francisco Fire Department’s Health, Safety and Welfare Division.
Since battling the Camp Fire, he developed a brain tumor the size of a pear. Most of the tumor was removed through surgery, and the cancer has been kept at bay through chemotherapy and radiation.
But he knows he’s not out of the woods.
“I really hope my brain cancer is the only cancer I get,” she said.
Reprinted E&E News Courtesy of POLITICO, LLC. Copyright 2025. E&E News provides essential news for energy and environmental professionals.
