Federal Signal Corporation has reached a settlement with 1,125 firefighters who claim they have hearing loss caused by the company’s sirens. Federal Signal has been fighting numerous law suits from firefighters for years. In the settlement the company agreed to pay $3.8 million to the firefighters represented by attorney Joseph Cappelli.
If you are an emergency responder who rides in a piece of apparatus with a siren mounted on the cab roof, or if you keep the windows down while the siren is blasting, you may have an increased risk of hearing loss. But even if your siren is on the front bumper you may still be at risk from the siren as well as the low frequency engine sounds which are transmitted through the bones in your skull to your ear. Headsets and ear plugs will provide little protection from the low frequency sounds.
To reduce your chances of hearing loss from the siren:
Wear ear plugs or a sound-attenuating headset.
Keep the windows up while responding.
Remove the siren from the top of the cab and install it on the front bumper.
Turn off the siren when you don’t need it.
More information about the dangers of hearing loss from sirens is HERE and HERE. And HERE is an interesting article that compares electronic sirens to electro-mechanical sirens.
And if your fire engines participate in parades, do not blast the sirens, no matter where they are located on the apparatus. In my town, the fire department has been known to blast the sirens from six to eight engines all at the same time in parades, while they drive very slowly past hundreds of spectators 10 feet away.
Vote on the most significant wildland fire stories of 2010
As we documented earlier this month, the 2010 wildland fire season, when measured by the acres burned in the 49 states outside Alaska, was the slowest since 2004. But in spite of that, there has been significant news about wildland fire. In fact, we posted over 670 articles this year.
Continuing that tradition, below we have listed the top stories of 2010. The line of duty fatalities are not listed unless there was an unusual spin-off story associated with the fatality. Below the list, there is a poll where YOU can let us know which stories you feel are the most significant of 2010.
Top wildfire stories of 2010
Jan. 8: The National Park Service released the report on the August, 2009 Big Meadow escaped prescribed fire in Yosemite National Park. The fire blackened 7,425 acres before being controlled by 1,300 firefighters at a cost over $15 million. It became the eighth largest fire in California in 2009.
Jan. 21:Federal wildland firefighter bill introduced in Congress. The “National Infrastructure Improvement and Cost Containment Act” would affect the pay, retirement age, and fireline liability of federal wildland firefighters.
Apr. 30: The International Association of Fire Chiefs, an organization that concentrates on structural fire, received at least $13.2 million from the U.S. Forest Service and DHS-FEMA over a seven-year period, reportedly for wildfire-related purposes. The IAFC became furious at Wildfire Today for exposing the information.
Aug. 2: Hundreds of wildfires in Russia claimed more than 50 lives, left more than 3,500 people homeless, and caused massive air quality issues in Moscow and other areas.
Aug. 2: A BAe-146 jet airliner was converted to an air tanker and was tested in Missoula. The Interagency Air Tanker Board failed to certify it due to inadequate ground coverage of retardant.
Aug. 26: In spite of weather forecasts that would have alarmed most fire managers, the Helena National Forest in Montana ignited the Davis prescribed fire during a near record heat wave. The fire escaped and burned 2,800 acres. The report was released in November. The Forest Supervisor said the report did not point out “something clearly that we did wrong, done incorrectly or that we’re going to make big changes on”.
Sep. 6: The Fourmile Canyon fire burned 6,200 acres and 169 homes a few miles west of Boulder, Colorado. The fire was devastating to local fire districts within the burned perimeter in several ways, including the facts that a firefighter’s burn pile escaped and started the fire, the homes of 12 firefighters burned, and one fire station and an engine inside it burned.
Sep. 21: The Commander of the Utah Army National Guard assumed responsibility and apologized for the Machine Gun fire that burned 4,346 acres and three homes near Herriman, Utah. The fire started during target practice with a machine gun at a National Guard base.
Sep. 24: The Australian state of Victoria tested the U.S.-built DC-10 very large air tanker and concluded that it did not perform adequately and would not be suitable for use in their wildland-urban interface areas.
Oct. 13: The US Forest Service’s response to the 2009 Station fire is criticized, and Congress holds hearing in Pasadena, CA about the management of the fire, which burned 160,000 acres near Los Angeles.
Dec. 7: NTSB holds a meeting about the helicopter crash on the Iron Complex fire in northern California in which nine firefighters and crew members died. Much of the blame was attributed to falsified helicopter performance documents supplied by Carson Helicopters when they applied for a contract with the U.S. Forest Service. Carson and the surviving co-pilot dispute that conclusion.
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Honorable mention stories (not exactly top stories, but interesting; they are not part of the poll).
May 11:NWCG outlaws the use of some terms, including “appropriate management response” and “wildland fire use”.
Jun. 20: It was not a wildland fire, but every firefighter can relate to some of the problems encountered when a kinked fire hose and improper procedures delayed the rescue of IndyCar driver Simona de Silvestro from her burning race car which crashed at Texas Motor Speedway.
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POLL
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Feel free to leave a comment (or “response”) explaining your choices, or to discuss other news items that did not make the list.
I ran across a news article about Senator Joesph Lieberman (I-CT) accepting the nomination to serve as one of the seven or eight Co-Chairs of the Congressional Fire Services Caucus, a nonpartisan group of more than 320 members of congress which:
…unites Republicans and Democrats in support of fire service legislation that benefits all first responders.
Rep. Peter King
In perusing the Caucus’s web site, which is run by the Congressional Fire Services Institute, it turns out that Rep. Peter King (R-NY) is the Chairman of the Caucus. His name rings a bell as the off-camera Representative to which Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) was directing his anger in the video we posted on July 30, 2010. (Here is a link to another video about that encounter.)
The heated rhetoric between the two members of congress concerned a procedural delay introduced by Rep. King which initially prevented the passage in the House of the 9/11 First Responder Health Care Bill, officially known in the Senate as “S. 1334: James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act of 2009“. Rep. King sought to delay the passage of the bill while Rep. Weiner angrily recommended passage. The bill would provide health care costs for 9/11 rescue workers, sickened after exposure to the toxic smoke and debris. Finally, the House passed the bill in September.
Recently, however, Rep. King has come out strongly in favor of the 9/11 First Responder Health Care Bill. In fact, he is one of the few Republicans to openly support it, and on December 7, 2010 wrote a letter to his Republican colleagues asking for their votes in the Senate.
There is still a chance that the bill will receive an up or down vote in the Senate before the session ends this year. Votes have been prevented previously by a Republican filibuster. If it is not passed by the Senate this year, the slate will be wiped clean and it will have to be re-introduced in both the House and the Senate next year.
But you can help get the bill passed. CALL YOUR SENATORS!Here is a list of their phone numbers.
If you are still undecided about helping firefighters, check out Jon Stewart’s position on the issue of health care for 9/11 first responders.
This bill is gathering more attention thanks to Jon Stewart. It appears that there are enough votes now in the Senate to pass a slightly revised version. BUT. There is one Senator that says he will hold it and prevent its passage. That esteemed individual is Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK).
In an interview on Fox News Coburn said two of his reasons for killing the bill are:
1. The bill has not been through a committee yet and there have been no hearings.
WRONG. A committee that Coburn is on held hearings on the bill, but Coburn chose not to attend.
2. Coburn said: “This is a bill that has been drawn up and forced through Congress at the end of the year on a basis to solve a problem that we didn’t have time to solve and we didn’t get done.”
WRONG. The bill was introduced in the Senate June 24, 2009, and was passed by the House on September 29, 2010, but has not been voted on in the Senate.
It is incredible that an idiot like this can single-handedly prevent our 9/11 first responders, some of whom are dying from exposure to toxic shit at the 9/11 site, to receive the health care they need.
Even if the Senate does pass this bill over the insane objections of Senator Dufuss Coburn, the House will still need to vote on the revised version, since it has been changed after they passed it in September.
More information:
Even Fox New’s Shep Smith took on Senator Coburn today for his stance on this bill. See the 37-second video HERE.
Shep Smith called many Senators who refused to talk with him about the bill. “We called a lot of Republicans today who are in office at the moment,” he said Monday afternoon. “These are the ones who told us ‘no’: Senators Alexander, Barrasso, Cornyn, Crapo, DeMint, Enzi, Grassley, Kyl, McConnell, Sessions, Baucus, Gregg, and Inhofe. No response from Bunning, Coburn, Ensign, Graham, Hatch, and McCain.”
And we wrote more about it on December 17, 2010. That post has two videos in which Jon Stewart takes on the issue.
Call your two Senators (list of phone numbers) especially if one or both of them are Republicans, most of whom plan to vote against the bill.
Call Senator Tom Coburn’s office at (202) 224-5754.
A few hours after we wrote our second article about this issue on December 17, if you searched Google for “9/11 First Responder Health Care Bill”, that Wildfire Today article was the fifth one listed on the first page. Now there has been so much publicity about the issue that Wildfire Today does not show up in the first five pages of Google results.
This is the sixth time we have used the tag “idiot” for an article since January, 2008.
We generally don’t stoop low enough here at Wildfire Today to write about politics, but there is one issue that anyone who cares about firefighters should not ignore – the 9/11 First Responder Health Care Bill, officially known in the Senate as “S. 1334: James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act of 2009“. It was introduced in the Senate June 24, 2009, passed by the House on September 29, 2010, but has not been voted on in the Senate. According to a CNN story, it is being filibustered by Republicans.
We first wrote about this bill on July 30, 2010 when Republicans in the House were fighting to kill the bill. In that article we included an amazing video showing Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) ripping into another Representative who intended to use certain procedures to prevent a vote on the bill. Two months later it passed the House, with a vote of 268 to 160.
The bill is named after a deceased New York Police Department detective who died after having worked at the 9/11 ground zero site in the toxic atmosphere. It seeks to provide medical coverage for the hundreds or thousands of firefighters, police, and other responders who worked at the 9/11 sites and were breathing the air that EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman said on September 13, 2001 was “not of concern”. Her statement contradicted scientists’ data from the previous day, and other facts that came to light later.
The mainstream media has virtually ignored this issue for the last several months. Recently Jon Stewart of the Daily Show has taken up the cause in a big way. On Thursday December 16 he said this:
Call minority leader Senator Mitch McConnell, (202) 224-2541. He has played a major role in preventing this bill from being voted on in the Senate.
One more video
One more Jon Stewart video about the 9/11 First Responder bill is below. It is from Monday, December 13. He starts talking about the bill at about the 2:00 minute mark.
Before we published the article on April 23 about the study that NIOSH is conducting on a possible link between structural firefighters and the occurrence of cancer, as part of our research we emailed Michelle Ryerson, the chair of the National Wildfire Coordinating Group’s Risk Management committee, formerly called the Safety and Health Working Team. We asked if the NWCG was aware of any similar studies that involved wildland firefighters. We also explained to her that we had talked with Travis Kubale, the NIOSH study’s primary project officer, who at the end of the conversation became interested in perhaps doing a cancer study on wildland firefighters. We passed along Mr. Kubale’s contact information to Ms. Ryerson, as well as others in the NWCG.
Today we received a response from Ms. Ryerson, which she called “an update from the NWCG Risk Management Committee perspective”:
NWCG was never approached by NIOSH to be included in this study.
The NWCG is coordinating with US Fire Administration on potential of including wildland fire to the NIOSH study.
NWCG has an active Smoke Exposure Task Group (SETG) under the auspices of RMC who’s focus is smoke hazard identification and mitigation for wildland firefighters and support personnel in fire camp environments (SETG website should be up and working by end of May).
The SETG began smoke exposure monitoring in 2009 and will continue monitoring in 2010 so that we can better understand the levels of smoke exposure both in fire camp and fireline operations.
The SETG is also preparing a long-term project proposal abstract to seek study sponsorship from universities, NIOSH, and other scientifical organizations.
Also worth mentioning is the fact that the DOI, FS, and many state agencies have instituted wildland firefighter medical standards programs that help track firefighter health issues throughout their arduous duty fire career.
We replied to Ms. Ryerson and the others that she had cc’d with her response:
I can imagine that employers of wildland firefighters may not be enthusiastic about opening a can of worms that may link cancer with exposure to smoke on wildland fires, but the Right Thing To Do is to look at this issue and either prove or disprove a link. I hope the NWCG will not only continue to collect data about the fire environment, but will also pursue a possible cancer link with just as much enthusiasm.
More information has come to light regarding the article we wrote last week about “Cancer risk and smoke exposure among wildland firefighters“. In response to an email, we heard from Brian Sharkey of the USFS’ Missoula Technology and Development Center, an exercise physiologist who was instrumental in the design of the Step Test and Work Capacity Test for wildland firefighters. We asked Mr. Sharkey if he was aware of any studies that considered a possible increased cancer risk for wildland firefighters. He said no, and:
However, our 1997 risk assessment (Booze in Health Hazards of Smoke, 1997) showed an increased risk only when we used “worst case scenario” – which estimated career exposure at exposure levels 95% of highest values measured. No one works for 25 years anywhere near those values. Also, some carcinogens are not as high on fires as they are in winter (from burning wood in stoves) (Smith et al.).
Structural FF do not have increased risk of lung cancer. Chinese women who cook over coal fires have more cancer – those who cook over wood fires do not.
We need a study of health effects that looks at all causes of morbidity and mortality – not just cancer (where risk is about 1 in 3 for US population). We also need an injury/illness surveillance system that tells us the impact of fire on respiratory, cardiovascular and – yes – cancer.
We asked Mr. Sharkey what data supported his statement that “structural FF do not have an increased risk of lung cancer”, and he was in a hurry, about to leave for a “smoke meeting”, but referred to a study on Philadelphia firefighters. We found the 24-year old study to which Mr. Sharkey may be referring. Here is an excerpt, the Methods, Results, and Conclusions:
Methods
We conducted a retrospective cohort mortality study among 7,789 Philadelphia firefighters employed between 1925 and 1986. For each cause of death, the standardized mortality ratios (SMRs) and 95% confidence intervals were estimated. We also compared mortality among groups of firefighters defined by the estimated number of career runs and potential for diesel exposure.
Results
In comparison with U.S. white men, the firefighters had similar mortality from all causes of death combined (SMR = 0.96) and all cancers (SMR = 1.10). There were statistically significant deficits of deaths from nervous system diseases (SMR = 0.47), cerebrovascular diseases (SMR = 0.83), respiratory diseases (SMR = 0.67), genitourinary diseases (SMR = 0.54), all accidents (SMR = 0.72), and suicide (SMR = 0.66). Statistically significant excess risks were observed for colon cancer (SMR = 1.51) and ischemic heart disease (SMR = 1.09). The risks of mortality from colon cancer (SMR = 1.68), kidney cancer (SMR = 2.20), non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (SMR = 1.72), multiple myeloma (SMR = 2.31), and benign neoplasms (SMR = 2.54) were increased among firefighters with at least 20 years of service.
Conclusions
Our study found no significant increase in overall mortality among Philadelphia firefighters. However, we observed increased mortality for cancers of the colon and kidney, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and multiple myeloma. There was insufficient follow-up since the introduction of diesel equipment to adequately assess risk. Am. J. Ind. Med. 39:463-476, 2001. Published 2001 Wiley-Liss, Inc.
Wildfire Today has called for a study on the cancer risks associated with wildland fire. Not just lung cancer. The study needs to be conducted by medical doctors and epidemiologists.
We also learned that a proposal was prepared by Joseph Domitrovich in December, 2008, for the US Forest Service Technology and Development Program to study the effects that carbon monoxide may have on the cognitive function of wildland firefighters. Here is an excerpt.
An extensive EPA review on CO effects (2000) concluded that behavioral impairments in healthy adults are not significant below 20% carboxy hemoglobin (COHb). However, some studies have showed mild impairments at 5% COHb or below. Cigarette smokers have COHb levels of 5-10%, sometimes as high as 15%. In view of the reported adverse effects among fire staff, suspect additive or synergistic interactions among pollutants that worsen the neurobehavioral effects that would be predicted from CO exposure alone.
PROPOSED TECHNOLOGY & DEVELOPMENT WORK:
The deliverable outcome of the proposed project is a report detailing the levels of smoke exposure and cognitive effects. This could then be used by IMT, crew bosses along with training (RX-410) to help better understand the potential cognitive effects when exposed to wildland fire smoke.
POTENTIAL BENEFITS:
This project will help us to better understand the effects of wildfire smoke on our cognition, which would increase safety of fire personal.
Wildfire Today recommends that this study be funded.
A “smoke meeting” is being held in Boise this week. It will interesting to see if anything that will benefit the health of firefighters will come out of the meeting. We understand that at least one actual medical doctor is beginning to be involved in smoke studies related to wildland firefighters, which is a step in the right direction.
Federal Signal Corporation has reached a settlement with 1,125 firefighters who claim they have hearing loss caused by the company’s sirens. Federal Signal has been fighting numerous law suits from firefighters for years. In the settlement the company agreed to pay $3.8 million to the firefighters represented by attorney Joseph Cappelli.
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