It may shock people to learn that cancer is the most dangerous threat to firefighter health and safety. In fact, cancer is the leading cause of fire fighter line-of-duty deaths. The risk from cancer can in large part be traced back to the increased use of chemical and plastic materials in much of our everyday lives. Firefighters encounter these risks in nearly every fire that we are called on to tackle. And with the rise of fast-moving wildfires threatening more urban areas, we are facing new risks to our health and our ability to knock down these blazes. This issue became more apparent here in Colorado after the Marshall Fire in 2022, where we also saw the concerning issue of contaminated drinking water linked to wildfires.
This threat to contaminated water from wildfires is not new; what’s new is that researchers are now diving into how it happens and the root causes. In 2017 and 2018, families returning home from the Tubbs and Camp fires in Northern California noticed an odor coming from their tap water. As water professionals investigated and enlisted independent researchers to help, they discovered melted plastic pipes and components and that the drinking water systems in Paradise and Santa Rosa had extremely high levels of benzene, a chemical that’s found in gasoline, plastics, and other products.
How did benzene get into the drinking water? The likeliest candidate: melted plastic pipes and components that were part of the drinking water infrastructure…