VIDEO: Connecticut State Fire Marshal Lauri Volkert was just six months into her career in the fire service, serving as a volunteer firefighter and following in her father’s footsteps, when the trajectory of it changed drastically in one day. September 11, 2001. “I started my fire service career back in March 2001,” she said. “So 9/11 was a very formative event for me in shaping my career in the fire service.” The tragedy in part led Volkert to eventually find her niche in investigating fires and improving the safety of the profession, and became Connecticut’s first female state fire marshal.
“Fire prevention, code enforcement, community risk reduction initiatives are all really important components and sometimes overlooked components of firefighter safety,” she said. “If we can prevent the fires from happening, that reduces the risk that firefighters are presented.” While improvements in firefighter safety have been made for decades, Volkert and other state firefighting experts believe, in some ways, the job is more dangerous now than ever before.
“Firefighters are responding to a wider range of emergencies and hazards, and also the fires are burning much hotter and much faster due to the plastics and polyurethane foam, lightweight wood, all of that,” Volkert said. “We never would have thought of lithium ion battery fires, electric vehicle fires, those types of things. That wasn’t even on our radar 24 years ago.” According to the National Fire Protection Association, deaths have been slashed in half over the last five decades, but have hit a plateau the last quarter century. On average, the U.S. Fire Administration reports between 70 and 100 firefighters have been killed in the line of duty over the past two decades.
Fire Marshal Anthony Dignoti of the Wethersfield Fire Department has a couple of decades on Volkert, with a career spanning 43 years. At sundown on Wednesday, he lowered the Connecticut Fire Academy’s flags to half staff in anticipation of 9/11 the following day. There were 343 firefighters who died on 9/11, but more than 400 firefighters have now died from post 9/11 illnesses, many of them cancer or respiratory-related.
According to the CDC, firefighters have a nearly 10% increased risk of developing cancer than the general public. The American Cancer Society found that they have a higher mortality rate from cancer, especially skin cancer, and firefighters’ mortality rate is nearly 60% higher than the general public. Dignoti is not just fighting fires and volunteering his time a few nights each month at the Connecticut Fire Academy. He, like so many other firefighters, has been battling cancer for the past three years. “I, probably like everyone else, probably thought it wouldn’t happen to me,” he said “Presently I have stage 4 cancer. I’m being treated up at Boston’s Mass. General Hospital on a special clinical trial. So far so good, I’m healthy right now but it just goes to show, you never know.”
Dignoti has had a successful career rising through the ranks to become a fire marshal, while also exposing him to invisible danger. Inspecting the sites of fires takes the same diligence as battling them, and now there is an even greater risk to inspectors, much less the first responding crews. “There were hazards back when I first started but it seems like we face greater dangers today,” Dignoti said. “Many years ago a lot of items in homes were made of wood, normal combustibles. Now we’re exposed to a lot of plastics, chemicals, fibers that throw off toxic gases that cause ailments for firefighters.”
Connecticut Fire Academy is tackling the epidemic head-on with the knowledge being shared in the classroom. Connecticut Fire Academy director of training P.J. Norwood finds himself most concerned about the high level of cancer among those in the fire service, and makes it known to the cadets in the program. “The number one health concern that I have as the director of training at the Connecticut Fire Academy and also as a retired firefighter is cancer,” he said. “Cancer is the number one killer of firefighters, and there’s many different types of cancers because we’ve been exposed in many ways.”
Upgrades to gear have made a difference, but it is even the simplest steps that researchers have come to realize will protect firefighters and their families. “Ten years ago, if you saw a firefighter with dirty gear and a dirty helmet, you’d say, ‘wow, he or she is a good firefighter.’ Today, clean is the new dirty,” Norwood said. “We promote and preach cleanliness and cleaning in firefighter decon, and we promote showering within the hour after a fire to get those carcinogens off our skin.”
One of the most pertinent improvements in gear has been made to self-contained breathing apparatuses (SCBA), which are able to better keep particles out and allow firefighters to venture further into flames. Decades ago, there would only be a couple SCBAs at most for each crew, but now every firefighter battling the flames dons one. The downside is that they trap more heat inside a firefighter’s gear, putting a greater cardiovascular strain on them, according to Norwood. “Firefighters are better protected today from the immediate and short-term health effects, and also the long-term health effects. But with that, it’s also a double-edged sword,” Norwood said. “The better the technology becomes for our self-contained breathing apparatus, the deeper and farther into buildings we go and we could put ourselves into a greater predicament.”
Norwood explained that every decision and improvement to firefighter safety is made with the help of research and science, which has come a long way the past couple of decades. “Researchers have showed how to better protect us from those elements by better insulating us today than we were 20 years ago or 30 years ago,” he said. “We understand our fireground more today than ever before, which means that here at the Connecticut Fire Academy we can train our recruits to understand that from their first day in the fire academy. The more we know about our enemy, the better we can fight it.”
Learning about the kind of fire they are fighting, and wearing better protective gear that is more versatile, have also aided firefighters on scene in recent years. Volkert says when departments have done well securing updated equipment, it is still up to the firefighters to use it. “We’ve got much better tools available to us. Our bunker gear is lighter wait, we have higher tech, thermal imaging cameras,” Volkert said. “The best recommendation I can make is for firefighters to stay informed and make sure they’re using the most up to date protective equipment and safety protocols they’re agency is providing them.”
Prior to 9/11, firefighters from different departments would not always have compatible radios, and even if they did, they may not have had shared terminology. To Volkert, that was one of the most enlightening elements of the job that could be improved post 9/11, and they have been. “Radio frequencies weren’t the same, and it wasn’t easy to switch over and to build those communications,” she said. “And having that common language of how do we respond to incidents, what roles need to be played and expectations of those roles.” Volkert will be helping onboard Connecticut fire departments with a new information collection system, the National Emergency Response Information System (NERIS). “We’ve been on an older system on the national level for incident reporting,” she said. “This is a whole new system that’s going to make the data much more real-time available and easier to analyze. It’s been really great to be able to build my career in such a way I can look back and see different ways I’ve been able to make people safer.”
Funding over the last two decades has increased on the federal level, and Norwood says the knowledge and equipment it has supported have allowed firefighter health and safety to improve. Norwood has seen his colleagues who responded to 9/11 deal with life-changing diagnoses in the time since then, but is hopeful that governmental support continues to be strong. “Many of our responders who responded here from Connecticut, not just New York City responders, have been impacted negatively, their health effects,” he said. “We have more access to federal dollars, which has given us the ability to expand our training and education which has allowed us to ensure firefighters are more prepared today than they were on September 11.”
Back in May, the state employee health and partnership plans were expanded to provide firefighters free and improved full-body cancer screenings every other year, which focus on early detection. That awareness is what Dignoti is sounding the sirens about these days. “I never would have thought, doing something I loved so much, there’s hidden hazards out there that caught up to me and caused this,” he said. Dignoti has loved firefighting all his life, ever since he saw the television show “Emergency” growing up. “It was a calling, I always wanted to do it, I was a teenager in the cadet program,” he said.
It is a tough job with unpredictable sacrifices sometimes made. But even in the dark of night after tying up the flagpoles, there’s a bright spot that stands out to Dignoti. Dozens of new cadets, just a week into their program, are training when they could choose to do anything else. They are committed to fighting fires by doing everything right, protecting both the public and each other.
