Firefighter Matt Alba was having flashbacks. Watching video footage of Los Angeles getting torched by wind-fed flames unlocked memories of his fight against the Camp Fire six years ago.
He spent 11 days in a fiery hell named Paradise, the California town that was incinerated by wildfire in November 2018. More than 18,000 buildings turned to ash. Alba had no lung protection for most of that time. But there was sickness in the smoke. He inhaled a toxic swirl of chemicals released from heavy metals and carcinogens as homes and cars burned. They can damage the brain.
He remembers sniffing a smoldering tree stump in a burnt down mobile home park. It smelled acrid and unnatural.
“I turned back to my crew and said, ‘Oh man, I just took five years off my life with that inhale,’” he recalled in an interview. “And that was before I came down with brain cancer.”
Cancer is the No. 1 cause of death among firefighters. Now, crews battling the Los Angeles blazes are again inhaling cancer-causing chemicals without proper respiratory protection. It underscores how communities are unprepared for the changing nature of wildfire. As global warming parches vegetation and primes the landscape for ignition, intensifying fires are increasingly storming into urban areas where they can release more harmful chemicals.
And firefighters are surrounded by poisonous smoke clouds.
The lack of respiratory protection is a problem that has been decimating wildland firefighters’ health for years. Despite new efforts following the Camp Fire, there are still no respirators on the market that are portable, able to filter out all the chemicals released by structure fires, and last long enough for the extended shifts of wildland firefighters.
“In 2018, we kept saying this is unprecedented over and over and over again, and we’re now using the same word to talk about these new fires,” Alba said. “But we should have seen it coming.”
Not so ‘wild’ fires
Firefighters battling the Los Angeles blazes have been given N95 masks and specialized respirators attached to oxygen tanks. It’s up to them whether to use them or not, said Edith Lai, a Los Angeles County spokesperson.
The masks with oxygen tanks, known as SCBAs, are commonly used by urban firefighters to protect themselves against the dangerous combination of plummeting oxygen levels and rising carbon monoxide. They also block the inhalation of toxic fumes, but they last only 30 to 45 minutes and can weigh up to 40 pounds. They are not designed for round-the-clock toxic exposures created by wildfires, like those in Los Angeles.
N95 masks are not viable alternatives either, said Joe Ten Eyck, wildfire training coordinator with the International Association of Fire Fighters union. They protect against some particle pollution but can’t filter out carcinogenic gases like polyaromatic hydrocarbons and dioxins, both of which are emitted from structure fires. The N95 masks stop only 11 to 15 percent of those chemicals, Ten Eyck said. They also restrict breathing in potentially dangerous ways during active firefighting.
“The firefighters out there on the line doing structure defense, perimeter control in Los Angeles right now are right there where the smoke is at its absolute worst, and the protection levels are not where we want them to be or need them to be,” he said.
Wildfires have historically burned vegetation. That smoke can be hazardous to inhale, too, because it contains tiny particles that can clog up respiratory systems, exacerbating asthma and other conditions. But increased development in previously rural areas means wildfires are increasingly occurring in urban spaces — burning more structures and releasing more chemicals.
Some 7,180 structures in California were destroyed by wildfires between 2004 and 2014, according to state data. Then the number exploded. In the past decade, wildfires burned nearly 54,700 structures. More than 18,800 of them were destroyed in a single blaze, the Camp Fire.
As more structures burn, firefighters are exposed to more chemicals — and more cancer.
“Plumbing has copper and lead in it. Paint has toxic chemicals. Electronics, plastics have really nasty stuff in them. All these chemicals we don’t think of occurring in a wildland fire are now part of the smoke,” said Mary Johnson, principal research assistant at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “The list is really long, and it’s really not good.”
Urban firefighting already had a cancer problem. Some 70 percent of line-of-duty deaths in the fire service were from cancer in 2016, according to federal data. In 2022, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer went so far as to categorize firefighting itself as “carcinogenic to humans” due to the sheer volume of chemicals encountered on the job.
A ‘carcinogenic’ job
Firefighters also encounter carcinogens in the foam they use to suppress flames, and even in some of their protective gear. The International Association of Fire Fighters union says that using SCBA respirators is “the single most protective voluntary activity” a firefighter can take.
But they aren’t typically available to wildland firefighters. Instead, they rely on neck gaiters or scarves to try and limit smoke inhalation. Even if SCBAs are available, their weight and short duration makes them impractical for wildfire fighting, when firefighters are often battling blazes for 10 to 24 hours at a time.
“Wildland firefighters are exposed to many of the same respiratory hazards that structural firefighters avoid by using self-contained breathing apparatuses,” warned the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
The Camp Fire was something of a turning point. But efforts to protect firefighters have been slow-moving.
Following the 2018 blaze, DHS said, “many wildland firefighters reached their respiratory damage limit” and retired.
Firefighters who fought Camp Fire have higher concentrations of toxins in their blood, according to a study commissioned by the San Francisco Firefighter Cancer Prevention Foundation. In that project, 80 firefighters were given blood tests a few hours after they deployed to fight the Camp Fire. Their blood carried carcinogenic flame retardants commonly found in plastics, electronics, foam and furniture at higher levels than the general population. They also had elevated levels of PFAS, a carcinogen and endocrine disrupter, and some firefighters also had higher levels of mercury and lead.
‘No effective device available’
Following the Camp Fire, DHS made grant funding available to develop respirators that would be well-suited to firefighting. They need to be lightweight, portable, long-lasting and easy to wear during strenuous activity like trench digging.
But progress has been slow.
“Currently there is no effective device available on the market that is validated to perform in smoke and that is sufficiently durable to stand up under the conditions that firefighters face in these incidents and would be practical to use given its size and weight,” Mike Wilson, a senior safety engineer with California, said in a presentation last month to the California Industrial Hygiene Council Annual Meeting.
One prototype to receive funding is a hip-mounted air purifying respirator from TDA research. It uses a fan to blow air over layers of HEPA filters to remove toxins before firefighters inhale them.
It has been tested in training exercises by CalFire and the Los Angeles Fire Department, but is still at least two years away from being mass produced, said Drew Galloway, the engineer who designed the device.
He remembers meeting with the parents of a firefighter who had been deployed to the Camp Fire for two weeks. It was his first fire, and it damaged his lungs so badly he had to retire.
“It’s almost like instantaneous black lung,” Galloway said. “That’s the biggest threat to wildland firefighters, is you have got to keep these carcinogenic particles out of their system.”
The California Occupational Safety and Health Administration has also tried to tackle the problem. The state issued a general wildfire smoke safety rule in 2020 that required employers to provide outdoor workers with masks when air quality rises above certain thresholds — but exempted wildland firefighters. Two years later, the agency published a draft rule aimed at protecting wildland firefighters. It would require that they be given the portable respirators being developed by Galloway.
But the rule has not been finalized, in part because the technology isn’t ready. The agency, which has worked with TDA Research to test its prototype, said it hopes the rule will be finalized in 2026.
“Protecting firefighters from serious smoke exposures when they are deployed to fight the state’s large wildland and wildland urban interface fires is one of Cal/OSHA’s highest priorities for firefighter safety and health,” said agency spokesperson Denisse Gomez.
Waiting is hard to stomach for Alba, 47, who is now a battalion chief in the San Francisco Fire Department’s Division of Health, Safety and Wellness.
Since battling the Camp Fire, he developed a brain tumor the size of a pear. Most of the tumor was surgically removed, and the cancer has been kept at bay by chemotherapy and radiation.
But he knows he’s not out of the woods.
“I just really hope my brain cancer is the only cancer I get,” he said.
