The job of wildland firefighters is “inherently dangerous,” but an analysis of nearly 500 wildland firefighter injuries over four years in the United States found no single activity on the job is more dangerous than another.
The analysis, recently published in the International Journal of Wildland Fire, used weekly U.S. Forest Service reports from between March 23, 2019, and Dec. 31, 2023, to create an in-depth assessment of wildland firefighter injuries. The researchers broke down the injuries by the activity being performed, the hazard encountered, and the severity of the injury.
The report found that there was no statistically significant difference in injury severity among wildland firefighter activities, outside of aviation. While aviation activities had the majority of fatal injuries, they had very few injuries overall.
“Across activity categories, average injury severity was relatively similar for fireline, ground transportation, camp/staging/project work, and illness categories,” the analysis said. “Our results do not indicate that incident complexity or incident kind affect severity, though previous research has found incident complexity may influence injury frequency.”
The report also found that there wasn’t a statistical difference in the number of injuries between fire types. Fewer injuries during prescribed fires appeared in the data set, which researchers said reflects the fact that Forest Service personnel spend substantially less time on Rx burns compared with the number of hours spent on wildland fire suppression.
No one region had greater proportions of wildland firefighter injuries either, despite higher levels of fire suppression occurring in the west and higher levels of prescribed burning in the east, the two had nearly the same rate of injuries.
“Protecting the safety of wildland firefighters cannot be solely reliant upon individual or realtime risk management, but must also include clearly defined organizational risk tolerances and appetites,” the report said. “We anticipate that future work may leverage this effort that identifies the hazards, their frequencies and consequences to provide additional insight into the tradeoffs between risks to firefighters and the goals associated with the suppression work with which they are assigned.”
3 Comments
This is surprising to me. Common sense (not backed by tesearch, of course) would allow that there is additional possibility of injury or death as layers of risk are added. For example, compare risk of an entry-level firefighter to that of a heli-rappeller or smoke jumper. One would think the method of delivery alone would add a fair bit of potential for harm.
This study looks at data from 2019 to 2023….
I find it interesting that there are no mentions of the historic fatal June 2013 Yarnell Hill Fire, the year 2013, fire shelters, deployments, or the GMHS debacle. Fatalities discussed are limited to aviation and tree strike incidents.
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