Where there's fire there's smoke

Last week, two firefighters tragically lost their lives when a tree fell causing their vehicle to roll off the road. Our thoughts are with their families and local communities, and the incredible toll this places on them. The investigations that will now follow will explore the incident, its causes and the contributing factors so that we can learn, hopefully to prevent future incidents. However, none of that can bring these people back. 

This article is not about that incident but it had to be acknowledged, with sadness. It reminds us of the risks that our volunteer firefighters face as they try to bring some semblance of control to large scale bushfires as they threaten communities around Australia. Fires are more prevalent and impactful than ever before, and we know that in the coming decades this trend will continue.  

All across Australia fires are now impacting people’s physical and psychological health. The greater Sydney region has been cloaked in a massive cloud of bushfire smoke for weeks, and health authorities are suggesting that many deaths will result. “Hazardous pollution levels are linked to ‘premature births, low birth weight babies, impaired lung development in children, asthma, heart disease, stroke, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and lung cancer’." These will in some ways be silent deaths, mostly occurring in hospitals away from the public gaze, to the very old, very young, or already ill. Chronic exposure to smoke will also make many people who are currently well, unwell in the longer term. We don’t yet know what the full social and financial burden of the fires will be, but it will be one of magnitude. 

Bushfire smoke injures, and can kill. The smoke may come and go, but it will come more often, and the effects will multiply.  

It is a serious work health and safety issue

Beyond the public health impact, one pressing workplace health and safety issue for our volunteer firefighters is the suitability and availability of personal protective equipment (PPE) including respiratory protective equipment (RPE). This was highlighted by a recent article where some volunteer brigade members were reported as privately purchasing their own equipment. At the same time, the Institute has heard from others who told us about people purchasing full face respirators and P3 particulate filters and donating these to their local fire brigades.

Everybody will agree that our volunteer firefighters must have appropriate and well maintained personal protective equipment to fight fires.  Their lives and their ability to protect our rural properties, country towns and national parks are at stake. 

Finding out the facts is not always simple. Tensions - between volunteer and career firefighting services and how they are managed, and between governments and firefighters’ unions - can flare. Health and safety issues can become politicised instead of being dealt with on their merits. The media feeds on dissonance. But no matter the drivers, I’m concerned that when volunteers are reported as buying or crowdfunding their own PPE, there are questions we all need to answer. The answers may involve politics, failures in communication, or failures in the provision of RPE - or a combination of those. 

Breathing smoke and appropriate RPE

When it comes to deciding what is suitable respiratory protection for firefighters, context is everything. Rural firefighters deal with fires in forests, farmlands and country towns. While smoke effects are obvious, and forest fires can also produce some toxic gases, and firefighters don’t always know what chemicals are burning in man-made burning structures. Shifts don’t just last 8 to 12 hours – firefighters may be on or around the fireground for days at a time, making choices about respiratory protection complex. Therefore we know it isn’t as simple as more filtration is necessarily better. The RPE must suit the particular circumstances, the operating environment and the firefighter’s personal needs. For example, at the far end of the scale, self-contained breathing apparatus is usually unsuitable for bush firefighting because of length of shifts versus air availability, weight of cannisters in the terrain of the working environment and the logistics of large-scale maintenance. But these might be needed in very particular circumstances. 

Mark Reggers, AIHS member and senior application engineer/Occupational Hygienist at 3M says: 

“It is not just a matter of adequacy of the equipment, but its suitability in the environment and for the tasks to be performed, … how it is used, over long shifts in hot and demanding conditions as well as its compatibility with other PPE. There are a range of respiratory protection options for the varying hazard contaminants and exposure levels for professional fire fighters, volunteers and the general public. For front line bush firefighters 3M recommends the use of reusable respirators (half face or full face) with at least a multi-gas (ABE) and P2 particulate filters.”  

Regulation and its application

We have been told most WHS regulators believe the type of face masks issued to volunteer firefighters by brigades is compliant with the minimum requirements under their WHS Acts, and  regulations and standards across states and territories are broadly similar – but we see variability. 

Firstly, regardless of what standards regulators set - as the outgoing head of the US federal health and safety regulatory body David Michaels said in his opening line at the World Congress for Safety and Health at Work in 2017: “We all know that compliance alone does not in itself produce healthy and safe workplaces.”  

Secondly, as an example of variability, it appears that the use of multi-gas (ABE) filters for gases such as formaldehyde and acrolein (which are known toxic gases in bushfire smoke) is quite variable across Australian rural fire brigades, and what is considered an acceptable minimum does appear to vary between jurisdictions and between professionals and volunteers. It appears that some do, some don’t, and some have a nuanced choice. 

Based on the evidence, are the minimum standards adequate in each state? If some jurisdictions’ requirements reflect more contemporary evidence what can we learn from them? 

Cost

There is always some commentary about equipment budgets and no doubt one of the concerns is the cost of fitting out volunteer firefighters with a higher standard of equipment and maintaining it. There is always a fair point between cost and reasonable steps taken, however if this is where the conversation starts, we will have immediately lost our way. 

Giving volunteers a say 

We know respiratory protection must not only be fit for purpose - it must fit the user and be comfortable in the environment its being used, or it won’t be worn. Brigades’ decisions about PPE including respiratory protection must be done in consultation with the users. Only they know the real demands and what they really need. The ACT rural fire service is doing local trials to see what respiratory protection their members think work when they are on the firegrounds. These trials need to be supported by good evidence and duplicated across Australia where similar activities have not yet been undertaken.

Planning  

If we read terms such as ‘unexpected demand’ or ‘unexpected scale’ of the fires, we will know there has either been a large-scale failure in risk management, or a failure of governments to respond to the risks being presented to them by fire services. The scale of the current fires was foreseeable and we know the trend is for things to be worse - so we must plan well, now.  

What needs to be done?

There is a need for immediate funding for a practical collaborative research project to be delivered before the next fire season. This should answer the question: What is the appropriate respiratory protection standard for rural firefighters in different firefighting scenarios. To be effective this research should involve the rural fire services, WHS regulators, relevant government agencies, the WHS profession including the AIOH, and led by expert researchers from an Australian university or universities.  

This evidence must then be used to inform relevant policy across Australia.