Firefighter safety crucial in Fort McMurray

On the evening of Sunday, May 1, thousands of people fled the first Fort McMurray neighbourhoods as a wildfire made its way to the city’s edge. By Tuesday, the fire had become massive, the province of Alberta declared a state of emergency and a mass evacuation began. As 80,000 people attempted to leave on a single highway, firefighters from Fort McMurray — and well beyond — stepped in to contain the blaze.

For firefighters, it’s a job on a massive scale, with safety risks and challenges at every turn.

Managing resources

Equipment, for example, is a necessity for fighting a fire like this one. Some equipment, though, requires energy to run. In an emergency situation, that can pose a real problem.

“One of the concerns the firefighters would have had was the difficulty in getting resources for their equipment,” says Michael Cadotte, president of Firewise Training & Consulting in Barrie, Ont. “Fuel and electricity would have been non-existent.”

As for using generators, Cadotte points out that the services providing these wouldn’t have been able to get into the area, at least not immediately. 

 “It’s like that in any emergency; you’re kind of chasing it around for the first little bit,” says Cadotte. “And it can be a couple of days until you find the resources you need.”

Another big challenge would be with the human resources, says Mike Ross, with Safety Works Alberta, in Lethbridge.

“As responders, you become engaged in an incident,” says Ross. “You certainly see that in large incidents like this, where people begin to take ownership of it.”

The challenge comes when people have to be removed so they can rest, he says.

“You have shifts but the firefighters, particularly the ones who initially responded, they don’t want to leave.”

“They would have an added energy to fight this fire,” says Cadotte. “They could easily go beyond their means just because of sheer emotion, not wanting to take a break, because this is their community, their homes, their families.”

Safety is a huge issue for fatigued workers, increasing the likelihood of injury and error, according to a 2012 study funded by the International Association of Fire Chiefs and the U.S. Fire Administration looking at sleep deprivation in firefighters.

Since sleep is a necessity for safety, on occasion, firm management is necessary, says Ross.

“Sometimes you have to physically remove the workers from the scene, otherwise they hover around on the extremities (and don’t get any rest).”

In the case of the Fort McMurray fires, the issue of fatigue would have been compounded by several factors, said Cadotte.

First, many of the firefighters were on the job for longer than usual, for days or even weeks on end. That means long exposure to intense heat, over a prolonged period of time, and heat stress, which causes fatigue, according to the Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety.

“They would have pretty much been continuously wearing personal protective equipment and you’re looking at about 80 lbs of equipment,” says Cadotte. “You’re looking at a lot of metabolic heat build up because the gear they wear protects them from external heat, but doesn’t allow the body to cool properly, through sweat.”

When firefighters are able to remove their equipment, they have to deal with another problem. With a typical structural fire, there’s a relatively “clean” area where firefighters can breathe relatively uncontaminated air, says Cadotte, but that wasn’t the case in Fort McMurray, given the scale of the blaze.

“At some point during the day, they would take their equipment off when they could find as good a refuge as was available, and then they’d be exposed to contaminants in the air.”

And that, says Cadotte, can lead to health problems down the road. “There are cancers — at least in the province of Ontario — associated with long-term exposure to these kinds of toxins.”

Researchers at the University of Alberta have been tracking firefighters’ health by analyzing urine, blood and breath samples collected immediately after they’ve left the wildfire area. Using a mobile laboratory set up just east of Edmonton, they’ve tested 85 first responders, so far.

“People who are exposed to high levels of smoke have been shown, in other studies, to develop acute bronchitis,” says Nicola Cherry, an occupational epidemiologist at the University of Alberta.

She and her colleague Jeremy Beach are looking for patterns among factors that impact firefighters’ health, such as work hours and respiratory devices.

“It might not be equipment, it might be how they change the filters, or the filters they have for washing their hands,” says Cherry. “There are a number of areas we can examine.”

Another factor impacting firefighter safety is communication — something that breaks down most often during emergencies, says Cadotte. That’s the nature of an emergency situation.

“First responders are dealing with a lot of noise, a lot of serious situations going on at the same time,” he says.

There can also be complications, as groups from other regions pitch in to help.

“In situations like this, they’re dealing with multiple agencies, so communication is a challenge,” says Cadotte. “Are they working on the same radio frequencies? And there’s also the issue of co-ordinating federal and provincial resources, which may have different procedures and ways of communicating.”

Technological problems can get in the way, too.

“We rely on digital technology so much, but it can fail very quickly, “ says Ross. “In an incident like this, one of the first things to collapse is often the cellular phone technology.”

In this case, too, the fire was in a remote region where cellular communications aren’t reliable.

To combat this, organization and constant check-ins are key.

“It’s very much like a military operation in these emergencies,” says Ross. “Firefighters would have the appropriate training so they understand what it is they need to report, how to report it, and then they’re in regular contact with everybody.”

Contingency plans would also have to be understood by all.

“As far as procedures and strategy go, they would need multiple plans in place,” says Ross. “If the wind direction would change, for example, they would need to know ahead of time what the change to strategy would be.”

Mental health

While physical safety is an ongoing concern in a situation like the one in Fort McMurray, there’s mental health to protect, as well.

“The most difficult thing in this kind of event would be the emotional end of it for the local fire service because they live in this community,” says Cadotte. “It’s their people, their homes. Certainly post-traumatic stress would be part of this, since it’s their own community.”

There’s an ebb and flow to a firefighter’s emotional well-being, says Ian Crosby, co-ordinator for the wellness and fitness centre at the Calgary Fire Department.

“Initially, they’re up on a kind of high dealing with the emergency. They have all this adrenalin as they’re dealing with the fire.”

But eventually, that wears off.

“We’re starting to see it now — with a little downtime, there’s some reflection and little bit of blaming going on,” says Crosby. “It’s a normal process but you see there are a lot of emotions starting to come out.”

The families moving back to Fort McMurray will be a relatively positive time for firefighters, he says.

“But then months later, when everyone’s gone, the media’s gone, and they’re dealing with the aftermath of something this big — that’s going to be another wave of difficulty.”  

“Professions like firefighting, law enforcement and the military — the people who join those professions tend to think of themselves as people who get brought in to solve a problem. They don’t like to look at themselves as having a problem. And that’s a difficulty,” says Crosby.

To help fhandle the stress, many larger departments have a Critical Incident Stress Management Team, often made up of firefighters who’ve been trained on stress management and can draw from personal experience.