Wildfire crews do important work managing wildfires, but that work is often done without masks.
A recent New York Times investigation found many wildfire fighters are getting cancer, cardiovascular diseases and some have even died because of the toxic smoke they inhaled while on the job.
Researchers at the U.S. Forest Service have recommended wildfire crews be required to wear masks for decades, but the agency has refused to provide them.
Hannah Dreier, an investigative reporter for the Times, joins us to share the details on why the agency won’t allow wildfire crews to wear masks and what she heard from people first hand.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Wildland firefighters who work for the US Forest Service are dying or becoming permanently disabled from cancer and cardiovascular diseases as a result of the toxic smoke they inhale while on the job. This is not a surprise. For decades now, researchers at the Forest Service have recommended that their crews be required to wear masks. The agency has refused. Not only are masks not required, they are prohibited. One former firefighter told The New York Times that he and others were treated like cannon fodder. Hannah Dreier is an investigative reporter for The Times. She just wrote a wide ranging article about this, and she joins us now. It’s great to have you on Think Out Loud.
Hannah Dreier: So good to be here.
Miller: You talked to more than 250 wildland firefighters, their supervisors, agency officials… I’m hoping you can tell us the story of just one firefighter to start us out with, Fernando Allende.
Dreier: Yeah, Fernando spent his career fighting wildfires for the US Forest Service, and in January, he was 32 and he was sent to the fires in Los Angeles. He was one of the first on the ground, and he said that he was in this black smoke that smelled like plastic. He couldn’t even see the ocean, and he worked saving houses for days on end. Just this summer, doctors found cancerous growths all through his lungs, and he was diagnosed with a form of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma that’s usually seen in much older people and that has been associated with smoke exposure.
He says that he was never told the risks of this work. He never really thought while he was in that smoke about himself. He was just focused on doing the job. Now he’s in this situation where he’s really grappling with the reality that the smoke exposure might well have caused this very serious cancer.
Miller: What is his prognosis right now?
Dreier: It’s an aggressive cancer, and he has been waiting to go in for chemotherapy because he is struggling to get workers’ compensation coverage. He’s supposed to be able to just sort of automatically get his healthcare treatment covered by the federal government because this is a cancer associated with his work, but there’s been a hold up. So between his first diagnosis and going in for chemotherapy, these growths in his chest have gotten much, much larger, and it’s a very scary situation.
Miller: What’s it like for him to see videos of firefighters right now working various places without masks on?
Dreier: I spent some time with him just in his home in Los Angeles as he’s awaiting this treatment, and all of his social media feeds are of course full of his former colleagues posting videos from the fires going on right now. He said that when he sees that smoke now, it doesn’t look heroic, romantic the way that it did when he was doing that work. It really looks like poison to him.
Miller: Can you give us a sense for the range of illnesses that wildland firefighters are susceptible to?
Dreier: So wildfire smoke – we’ve known this for years – is associated with a wide range of illnesses. There haven’t been as many studies done just on firefighters, but there have been a lot of studies about what happens when you get exposed to this kind of smoke. We’re talking mostly about lung damage, heart damage, and cancer.
I spoke with firefighters who were getting strange cancers in their 20s. They were getting pre-cancerous nodules in their lungs in their 30s. They’re getting COPD. People tell me that they can’t breathe, that they wake up in the middle of the night coughing. And then in their 40s, some of them are being told that they’re going to need double lung transplants because there’s just so much dead lung tissue.
Miller: What have the US Forest Service’s own researchers found when they’ve looked into this issue?
Dreier: This is something that really surprised me. I thought maybe the Forest Service sort of hadn’t known how dangerous this work was, but actually, going back to the 90s, the Forest Service’s own researchers have found that smoke is full of carcinogens, can be very dangerous, and they’ve pointed to the need for masks for these firefighters.
Miller: Going back to the 90s, so more than 30 years at this point.
Dreier: Yes. At some point everybody thought that smoke from a wildfire was benign, like a campfire. The idea is “this is just organic material. It’s not going to be as bad as a house fire.” But in 1988, there were huge fires in Yellowstone and more than 10,000 firefighters got sick. So after that, there was a big push to sort of understand what are the real risks of this smoke. And in the early 90s, it became very clear that the smoke was dangerous.
Miller: You have a devastating set of sentences in the middle of your article where you excerpt recommendations from various US Forest Service officials or staff members saying to their supervisors, “yes, in various ways, you should have the frontline folks wear masks.” How has the Forest Service responded to all of those recommendations over the years?
Dreier: The truth is these firefighters still are not given masks and they’re actually not allowed to wear masks on the fire line. The Forest Service says this is because they worry that firefighters could overheat – and it is very strenuous work – but the truth is that in other countries it’s now standard for wildland firefighters to wear masks, and they just take them off when they’re overheating.
They put them on when it’s smoky, when they’re standing around, and then when the smoke goes away or they’re doing something really strenuous, they’ll often pull them down. What researchers in other countries have found is that that’s fine, that still reduces the exposure.
Miller: What are we talking about in terms of masks? I mean, is it the kinds of masks that most of us wore during the pandemic or heavier respirators? What are they wearing, say, in Greece or Canada? What might they wear in the US?
Dreier: So in other countries, they’re generally wearing the sort of half face respirators that a demolition crew might use or a painter might use. These are those plastic masks that have filters on both sides that you could replace. But firefighters in other countries also just wear simple N95 masks like we all used during the pandemic, and those are also 95% effective in blocking out these toxic particles, which is so much more than what firefighters currently have, which is zero.
Miller: So the agency says, even though this is contradicted by what other countries seem to be doing successfully, that firefighters would overheat if they required masks. What are the reasons for the agency’s decisions that you heard from agency watchdogs or people who are critical of this long standing set of decisions?
Dreier: What internal watchdogs and whistleblowers told me is that what’s really going on here is that if the agency were to hand out masks, that would be equivalent to admitting that smoke is dangerous. And if the agency admitted that smoke is dangerous, there could be a cascade of really expensive consequences.
They might have to start covering all of these health conditions. They might have to start paying for firefighters to sleep in hotels so that they could get out of the smoke for a few hours. They could have to hire more workers, and it could also make it even harder to recruit for these jobs that start at $15 an hour, and it’s already pretty hard to recruit for. So all of that has sort of contributed to this resistance to grappling with how dangerous this work really is.
Miller: Does that seem accurate, at least from what you’ve heard? That if they were to be more honest about the risks there would, for example, be a shortage in terms of the firefighters available?
Dreier: I mean, these jobs are not like the jobs that you sort of imagine your normal urban firefighter working. These guys are in the woods for two weeks at a time. They’re pretty much gone from their families for the whole summer. They’re taking on a lot of immediate risks like from trees falling, from the prospect of being burned by the wildfire.
Then when you add in the idea that if you do this for your career, you might get cancer, you might die of cancer at an early age, your lungs might stop working… What I heard from a lot of people who work in the agency is that could just make it so hard to find people to do this job, and this is an agency that’s already chronically understaffed.
Miller: You asked to speak about this with seven former Forest Service chiefs. Only one of them you wrote, Dale Bosworth, agreed to speak to you. What did he say?
Dreier: He said sort of a version of what we’ve been saying here. He said he didn’t think that the firefighters would want to wear these masks. It could be a fight with them to try to get them to wear them. He also said that he didn’t understand just how dangerous smoke was back then. He retired in 2007, and it’s true that there was less research back then about the long term effects of this work on the people who do it. But people who were working at the agency at the time doing smoke research told me that is ridiculous. We knew very early that this work was dangerous and people just did not want to admit it.
Miller: So from the critics saying less a question of not knowing and more a question of not wanting to know, not wanting to admit because it was a very uncomfortable truth.
Dreier: Yeah. The people who have researched smoke for the Forest Service say that this is a story of willful ignorance. It’s true that year after year, there have been official recommendations to this agency that they start a cohort study. That they start really investigating what is happening to the workforce and start tracking cancer rates, lung damage rates… and the Forest Service never started that. I think that sort of goes back to this question of how important was it for the agency to be able to say, “we’re not sure if smoke is dangerous, maybe smoke is actually fine.”
Miller: What did you hear about the social aspect of this? To go back to one of the arguments that Forest Service officials have made is that they’re saying “our frontline staff, they don’t want to wear these anyway.” When you talked to firefighters, what did you hear?
Dreier: There is always resistance to wearing respirators. One thing that I was surprised to learn is that urban firefighters also used to go into burning buildings with no masks. When labor officials forced them to start wearing masks for their own health and safety, there was huge resistance. They said, “we can’t do it, this is going to ruin the industry.” And then urban firefighters just adjusted, and now it would be unthinkable for them to do that work without the sort of sealed mask and air canister that we all know urban firefighters use.
Miller: Has that made a difference in terms of cancer rates or other diseases among urban firefighters?
Dreier: Researchers have told me that cancer rates are falling among urban firefighters. It’s a tough thing. They’re not zero. Urban firefighters also still have their own elevated cancer rates, but with a mask, the exposure is far, far less. So with wildland firefighters, there is a cultural resistance to this. They tell me that they don’t want to have something else on their face. They don’t want to have to carry around something else. Then a lot of people also told me they feel like they would look weak if they were wearing a mask. They don’t want to be the only one doing it.
I also though talked to a lot of younger firefighters doing this work who said they would like to be wearing masks, but they feel like they would be teased or like they would be looked at strangely if they wore them. So until there’s some kind of requirement or at least suggestion that these firefighters wear a mask to protect themselves. I think that cultural resistance is going to be a big issue.
Miller: There’s a really important piece of this too. You point out that in the Forest Service’s current handbook, which outlines the risks of the job, any mention of the long term health issues related to smoke… They’re not there, there’s nothing about that. So if young firefighters are not being told that the smoke you’re breathing in could kill you or could debilitate you, could make it so you can’t pick up your kid like you used to – all stories from your article – it seems that they’d be much less likely to put up with the annoyance of a mask.
Dreier: That’s right. Person after person told me they had no idea that smoke was dangerous in this way, and part of that comes down to the lack of training. They get tons of training about the short term risks of fire, trees, even smoke! They get training that smoke could make it harder to see, things like that. But there’s just nothing in these materials about cancer or lung damage or any of these long-term risks. So when people get sick, they told me they’re often shocked.
Miller: You mentioned workers’ compensation earlier in the case of Fernando Allende, who’s stuck trying to see if he can actually get his necessary cancer treatment paid for. What did Congress do in 2022 for firefighters workers’ compensation claims?
Dreier: Congress passed a law that was supposed to spare these firefighters from having to prove that their health issues were related to the work they’d been doing. Before 2022, people were, say, getting lung cancer and then having to spend months and months trying to prove that their lung cancer came from this work, and that is an almost impossible thing to do with something like cancer.
So congress passed a law that said, we’re just gonna assume that if you get one of these specific kind of cancers or COPD or have a heart attack while you’re working, we’re gonna assume that’s because of the smoke exposure. That was supposed to spare these firefighters from having to basically wrangle paperwork when they’re at their very sickest. In practice, it has not been working out like that.
Miller: Why not?
Dreier: Well, for one thing, the department that was handling these claims was hit pretty hard by the Trump administration’s reorganization of the federal government earlier this year. I’ve talked to many people who took early retirement, who took buyouts and left that department and the firefighters who still have active claims have told me it’s just chaos even trying to get somebody on the phone.
Miller: Two years ago, because of a different act of Congress, a study to track the long-term health of 4000 firefighters finally began. That’s something that, as you reported, the Forest Service had resisted for many years. But then, according to your reporting, that too was disrupted by the Trump administration. What happened?
Dreier: The firefighters who have a stake in all of this are just heartbroken watching these hard won victories fall apart this year. This was supposed to be the first study that would allow us to say definitively what the hazards of this kind of smoke exposure are. It launched, firefighters started signing up, more than 500 wildland firefighters who already have cancer diagnoses signed up for this study. Then in the spring, all of the people running it were laid off and so the sign up portal went down, there was no work being done. Now some of those people have been hired back, but they say that the work is still disrupted.
Miller: Near the end of your article you wrote about members of a hotshot crew who were fighting the Gifford fire about two hours north of LA. Did you go on the scene of where they were fighting the fire?
Dreier: Yes. Part of my reporting was going to the fire line to see what conditions really are and also just how possible it is to wear a mask when you’re out in these hot smoky places.
Miller: Were you wearing a mask?
Dreier: Yes. The New York Times requires us to wear masks when we’re in hazardous situations like that. So I had an N95 on the whole time. I felt like a huge nerd because I was the only person in a mask.
Miller: Nobody around you was wearing a mask.
Dreier: Not a person. The smoke was so thick that it was hard to see even a few feet ahead. People’s eyes were watering, people were coughing. But nobody pulled out a mask. Nobody had one because they’re not allowed to use them.
Miller: This was after you had reported on many, many young men – almost all the people that you talked to, I think to a person were men, which reflects the gender breakdown broadly of of these frontline crews – but so many of them were so sick and it was after that that that you were on this fire line, the only person in a mask. What was going through your mind?
Dreier: Yes, and let me say there are also women who do this work. It’s maybe 10% but there’s some very cool women who are also wildland firefighters.
Miller: Totally, and we’ve talked to them. I didn’t mean to imply that there are no women, but they’re not… they’re obviously in the minority.
Dreier: Yes they’re a minority absolutely. I mean, it was so spooky to me to see these young men, like you say, out on this fire with no masks and to really understand that they thought that they were safe. They told me the same thing people sort of used to think decades ago… that the smoke was probably safe because it was organic. They told me their supervisors make sure they’re never in a place that’s dangerous.
I knew from doing all of these other interviews that actually the danger was huge and the odds are that some of those same men are going to end up with these really life altering smoke related conditions.
Miller: Hannah, thanks very much.
Dreier: Thank you.
Miller: Hannah Dreier is an investigative reporter for The New York Times.
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