Protecting firefighters: ‘It’s the right thing to do’

A firefighter's job is to go into a potentially deadly situation - namely a burning building - and to control and monitor that situation until it no longer presents a danger to the public.

A firefighter’s job is to go into a potentially deadly situation - namely a burning building - and to control and monitor that situation until it no longer presents a danger to the public.

While most people can refuse to work if they feel the job at hand is an overly perilous one, firefighters cannot. In spite of extensive training and constantly advancing equipment and safety standards, firefighters still die in burning buildings.

But it is the more insidious loss of life which two representatives of the International Association of Fire Fighters were in Whitehorse to speak about last week.

“There’s probably no single issue more important today to firefighters than occupational injury and health,” association trustee Alex Forrest told an audience made up of city, airport and volunteer firefighters.

Firefighters who die on the job, in a structural collapse, for instance, are well-covered by workers’ compensation legislation, he said, but those who die from cancer and heart failure are not.

Firefighters suffer from a higher rate of heart disease, are more prone to a number of cancers and have a shorter life expectancy than most professions, according to Forrest’s research.

These are people who start their careers with an unusually high level of fitness, Forrest pointed out, making their eventual poor health even more alarming.

Some of these health effects can be mitigated, he said, by always wearing the right protective gear when working a fire and keeping one’s equipment clean and

contained. But the toxins released when a building goes up in flames still find their way into the human body.

“Our masks are constantly improving,” Forrest said, “but now the evidence is telling us that absorption through the skin - through the pores - is the primary mode, not inhalation.”

Once the toxins - from smoldering asbestos, glue, plastics and more - get into a person’s bloodstream, they are effectively distributed throughout the body.

As such, when firefighters contract cancer, they get it in their blood (leukemia and lymphoma), their system-cleaning organs (kidney, bladder, colorectal and ureter cancers), and organs which require the most constant blood flow (brain and testicular cancers). The lungs and esophagus also make the list, in spite of breathing equipment.

Forrest, a firefighter-cum-lawyer, was in Whitehorse last week to promote new health and safety laws - ones that would ensure firefighters who are diagnosed with any of the 10 types of cancer listed above are automatically compensated without having to prove their illness is work-related.

As it stands in the Yukon, it is the employees’ responsibility to show when and how they were injured. That’s a straightforward task for someone who has been badly burned or otherwise hurt on the job, but much more complicated for a firefighter who has never smoked, yet finds himself dying of lung cancer at age 45.

“There is no difference if one fire kills you or if 300 fires kill you,” Forrest said.

The legislation, which has been adopted in British Columbia, Alberta, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Ontario, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and 37 American states, including Alaska, does come with some caveats, Forrest said.

Firefighters who smoke will not be covered for lung cancer. The disease must first appear in one of the designated organs, rather than moving from another part of the body, and firefighters must work for between five and 15 years to be eligible for the coverage.

“No other profession has this type of protection,” Forrest said. “It’s the right thing to do because we give up quality of life for our profession.”

He credited the strong firefighters’ union for urging provincial governments into passing the bill.

“There hasn’t been one vote against this legislation anywhere in Canada,” Forrest said. “The evidence is indisputable - this is legislation based on science.”

In the Yukon, the Whitehorse Fire Department has taken up the torch to have presumptive cancer legislation passed here. Platoon chief Don McKnight joined Forrest in meetings with Valerie Royle, the president of the territorial workers’ compensation board, last Friday, and expects to meet with government ministers next month.

“Overall, the meeting went well,” McKnight said of the talk with Royle. “We discussed the leg. we’re proposing and basically discussed ways we could work together and how could move this forward.

“We’ll be working not only on legislation but on preventive measures,” he added, “through things like medical monitoring, health and wellness training, and awareness.”

More firefighters need to be educated about the danger posed by chemical-laden gear, McKnight and Forrest said. 

“Equipment’s got to be decontaminated and cleaned as well as possible, as quick as possible,” McKnight said.

Most full-time firefighters never take their gear home, he said, but volunteer firefighters may be carrying their gear around in their back seat, or storing it in their homes where it poses a health risk not only to them but to their families.

Workers’ compensation board spokesman Mark Hill echoes that sentiment.

“We would like to see at least as much emphasis put on prevention as is put on the claims process,” he said.

When asked if the workers’ compensation board would support the firefighters, he said:

“Presumptive legislation is not a bad idea - we have not had to deal with a firefighter cancer claim, so this would be a forward-looking thing.”

But according to Forrest, just because there are no claims doesn’t mean there are no cases. In Winnipeg, 40 claims were made the year after the law was passed; the year before, there were zero.

Although McKnight and his colleagues will be meeting with lawmakers on this as early as this month, he said he doesn’t expect to see it come up in the legislature until next year.

“It’s passed unanimously in every other jurisdiction,” Forrest said. “We’re focusing on Yukon now because if it passes here, then the other territories will follow.

“Right now, there’s an inequality because some firefighters are protected and some aren’t. The fair thing is to right that inequality.”