Precaution Essay: The American Fire Service

For years, the American fire service thought that the number one killer of firefighters were heart attacks and other cardiac emergencies, due to the high number of them and the physical stress of firefighting. The American public probably thinks of the number one killer of firefighters to be thermal injuries or structural collapses. Surprisingly, the most powerful enemy to the fire service, a silent but deadly one, is cancer.
When I first started as a Firefighter, a short nine years ago, conversations about cancer in the fire service didn’t come up in the fire station. Sure, we talked about cancer, maybe a friend or relative that came down with it. Even if one of our colleagues came up in the conversation, as one of our most cherished brothers, Robert D. Henderson, perished after my first year in the Department, we never attributed the cancer to the job that we love so much. I think we knew that the great risk was there, and I’m not sure why it didn’t come up more then, as some Fire Departments around the country were realizing the danger of cancer and were taking steps to prevent it. We did take one precaution early on, in the form of equipment to wash the carcinogens out of our fire gear, but the conversation still never really came up.
For us, the real eye opener came with research out of …show more content…
Most stations are equipped with plymo-vent systems, a system that hooks on to the tail pipe of the truck, and when the truck starts, it sucks all the harmful diesel exhaust out of the fire station. Some old fire stations in the bigger cities, which the apparatus are started in more due to the high number of calls, are poisoned with the remnants of the diesel exhaust. Mattresses, couches, chairs and linens are saturated with soot from it. Walls and ceilings are discolored. All new fire stations are being constructed with these, but plans need to be made to outfit stations that will be around for years to