Hundreds of US firefighters die every year, and job-related cancer is far and away the biggest killer, according to Sean DeCrane with the International Association of Fire Fighters union. He places some of the blame on outdated federal safety rules that protect firefighters, enacted in 1980.
“It’s long past due that the firefighters that are out there responding every day are provided some protection by the federal government when it comes to workplace safety,” said DeCrane.
That protection could come in the form of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s new Emergency Response standard, a proposal still under review.
“If these regulations had been in place 40 years ago, we would have saved hundreds, if not thousands, of firefighter lives,” DeCrane said. “Just from early detection of cardiovascular disease, or understanding of exposure to toxins and carcinogens, proper training, proper equipment.”
But while all of that sounds great to the career firefighters DeCrane represents, most fire departments in the U.S. are not paid. According to the National Fire Department Registry, more than 4 out of 5 departments are all volunteer, or mostly volunteer.
And for volunteer firefighters, the added money and time necessary to comply with OSHA’s new proposals are not welcome.
OSHA’s proposal is huge — 608 pages. The agency wants to increase training requirements, require more pre-planning for emergency situations, set stricter limits on the lifespan of some firefighting equipment, and impose more rigorous health screenings for fighter fighters. Most of it would be expensive for volunteer fire departments to implement.
Take training: the proposed regulations demand 80 hours of training for firefighters. For volunteers, that means two full weeks of work, squeezed in here and there, for no money.
“If I tell some of them younger guys that, ‘Hey, you can’t spend the night with your wife and kids. You got to go to training tonight,’ they might tell me to go pump sand,” said Joel Cerny, chief of the Linwood, Nebraska, volunteer fire department.
The stepped-up inspections OSHA proposed would mean that all of Cerny’s 20-year-old fire trucks would need an annual checkup from a certified mechanic. Another big problem.
“That means I have to take the fire truck out of my district because we don't have anybody living in our district that's a certified mechanic. So then I'm taking the truck out of the district for the whole day, leaving my district unprotected,” said Cerny.
Many volunteer departments use old “turnout gear” — the helmets, jackets, pants, and boots that firefighters use — and, depending on how often a particular volunteer shows up to fight fires, that gear may not get much use. But OSHA’s proposed rule would require replacing that $4,000 suit every 10 years.
Replacing all that gear would take half a year’s budget, said Cerny.
“There’s some of them guys that maybe only put that gear on once a year and, for small towns like ours, it just doesn’t make sense,” he said.
OSHA is also calling for extensive annual physicals for firefighters, the kind that include thousands of dollars worth of tests, according to Dave Denniston, chief of the Virgil Fire Department in upstate New York.
Add up all the costs, and Denniston figured the new regulations would require a 42% budget increase for his volunteer department. He said if the rules take hold some fire departments will fold.
“There's a lot of folks that have said we'd have to close our doors,” said Denniston. “We've looked at it and said we would have to do one of two things: We would either have to greatly increase our taxes, or we would have to ignore it and just hope that something didn't happen.”
Denniston believes that if any volunteer fire departments end up governed by OSHA’s proposed regulations, trial lawyers will argue that all volunteer departments should be governed by it, and small departments will be exposed to litigation.
“There’s a ton of confusion,” said Denniston. “But that all goes, again, to the 608-page document that they put out,” he said. “One of our fears is where these things are going to get decided — they’re going to get decided in courtrooms further down the road when someone gets injured or killed.”
OSHA officials have said they never intended the proposed regulations to cover all volunteer fire departments. And, after some bi-partisan pushback led in part by Kansas Republican Sen. Jerry Moran, the agency has promised to revisit the proposal with an eye toward protecting volunteer departments from burdensome or superfluous regulations.
But Denniston is still anxious about the sweeping proposal.
And volunteer firefighters aren’t the only ones concerned. Some larger professional departments will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to comply with the new OSHA standards, and Yucel Ors, with the National League of Cities, said municipalities and counties will have to pick up the bill.
“In a nutshell, they are an unfunded mandate on local governments,” Ors said.
The forced spending, he noted, could come just as the House of Representatives passed legislation that would lop 10% off federal grants for local fire departments.
