SAN DIEGO—Hundreds of San Diego firefighters are filing documents establishing their right to financial compensation for cancer caused by asbestos, a potentially dangerous building material discovered last year throughout the city’s fire training facility.
Firefighters unwittingly exposed themselves to asbestos for nearly two decades at the training facility near San Diego International Airport, leaders of the city’s firefighters union said.
While no active or retired firefighters have been diagnosed with asbestos-related cancer, the documents establish — in case anyone does get sick — that firefighters spent hundreds of hours training in a facility with exposed asbestos.
“It’s not a lawsuit or a claim, it’s just simply a form that all employees can submit to risk management saying that they had some type of minor injury or exposure,” said Jesse Connor, union president.
“It basically preserves their right, so if anything happens in the future, they can point back to this minor injury report and say, ‘It’s because I had 20-plus years of exposure,’” he said by phone this week. “But unless they come down with something, it essentially just lives in a file. There’s no monetary exchange.”
Connor said he believes nearly all of the city’s 908 firefighters have filed such reports since the exposed asbestos was discovered last summer in the training facility, which the city acquired from the U.S. Navy.
Because the problem stretches back to when the city established the training facility in the late 1990s, Connor said union officials have also encouraged retired firefighters who trained there to file the same documents.
“If you had an exposure in that 20-plus years, then you could potentially be eligible for some type of recovery if you come down with symptoms,” he said. “We’ve done the best that we can to notice the retired folks who are in touch with other firefighters. But when people retire, you kind of lose touch with them because they sometimes move away and become hard to get a hold of.”
Connor said the problem stems from the training activities conducted at the facility, which spans four buildings constructed between 1954 and 1967 just south of the airport as part of the Naval Training Center.
The asbestos was undisturbed within walls, floor tiles and insulation during the years the Navy controlled the buildings, but the firefighter training activities began disturbing the dangerous, fibrous material.
“The problem started when firefighters began doing destructive training in those buildings,” Connor said. “Obviously we have an inherently dangerous job and have to participate in training where we breach walls and breach doors, and it wasn’t well known which areas had the asbestos.”
Asbestos has been linked to lung cancer and mesothelioma, a cancer occurring in tissue surrounding internal organs. The federal government banned new construction using asbestos in 1989.
Complaints from firefighters prompted the city to cease training exercises in the affected buildings last summer, Connor said.
The city recently completed $210,000 in asbestos abatement and clean-up work on buildings the Fire-Rescue Department plans to continue using for firefighter training, department spokeswoman Monica Munoz said by email on Thursday.
Some other buildings where no future training is planned have been closed and permanently secured, she said.
The closures and abatement work didn’t force the city to relocate training away from the site next to the airport, but a few training activities were relocated to different areas of the property, she said.
“The health and safety of our employees remains a top priority,” Fire-Rescue Chief Colin Stowell said in an emailed statement. “The city of San Diego has completed the required abatement work at NTC in the areas we occupy and use for training, and we will continue to restrict all access to areas not abated or cleaned.”
City Councilman Chris Cate of Mira Mesa said by phone on Thursday that the problems at the site should accelerate city efforts to establish a modern training facility, possibly for both firefighters and police officers.
“As a city we’ve been making the best of what we have,” Cate said. “I don’t think it was ever meant to be a long-term training facility for fire given the conditions there and long-term neighborhood development that was going to be occurring.”
Cate said the city has handled facilities for public safety training in the same shortsighted way it’s handled other infrastructure challenges in recent decades, that is, instead of focusing on long-term solutions that might be more expensive, city officials have opted for cheaper fixes that come with problems.
“My hope is the city can begin a serious conversation about a long-term option for a training site,” he said, suggesting available land on Copley Drive in Kearny Mesa could be an option.
Councilman Chris Ward of University Heights agreed that proper facilities for firefighter training should be a priority.
“The city of San Diego has a responsibility to ensure first responders have access to the equipment, training and facilities they need to protect our communities,” Ward said in a statement. “We depend on the men and women of Fire-Rescue to run into danger every day. They need to be able to depend on us as well.”
The city acquired the NTC land as part of a federal Base Realignment and Closure effort that led to several military bases being decommissioned. In addition to the site near the airport where firefighters now train, the NTC site also included the land where the Liberty Station mixed-use development is located.
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