When it comes to personal protective equipment (PPE), who but a firefighter would know best what we need? My friend and mentor, Jim “The Leprechaun” Campbell, always told me, “We wear it, use it and our lives depend on it; [firefighters] should have the ultimate say in what we wear.” Why not? Think of what the equipment was when we came in and what it has evolved into today. I’ve been on the job 27 years and I marvel at how much the equipment has changed.
Many of those changes have come as a result of National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) 1971 Standard on Protective Ensembles for Structural Fire Fighting and Proximity Fire Fighting and NFPA 1851 Standard on Selection, Care, and Maintenance of Protective Ensembles for Structural Fire Fighting and Proximity Fire Fighting. These two main standards are not only the firefighter’s guide for their protective clothing, but also their assurance that standards and technology will move forward with the times. We are currently at the beginning of the process for the next update of the 1971 Standard, which is targeted for publication in 2018. Public input for this next edition of the standard is open until July 5, 2015. The next edition of NFPA 1851 is due to be published for 2019 and is not open for public input just yet.
The largest percentages of people on these committees are either current users or past users of firefighting PPE. I am a shift fire lieutenant and, as a current user, it never ceases to amaze me how much goes into our equipment standards. As firefighters, we all do evaluations, field tests and spec writing, but the equipment and material testing done before anything gets certified to be produced is detailed and meticulous, to say the least. Many of the tests now used are adapted or brought straight over from other industries or applications. Having said that, many of the end users on the committee are pushing for more firefighter occupational-type testing to mimic what we do, how we do it and in the environment or circumstances it is used. In other words, practice like we play. Why wouldn’t we test the equipment and materials under the same conditions we operate?
Thermal protection
We always talk a great deal about thermal protective performance (TPP) and total heat loss (THL). Do we want to raise the minimums? Is it time for a maximum TPP? After all, the Stoll Curve is based on data presented in 1969 (see sidebar).
The NFPA minimum TPP for firefighting bunker coat, pants and gloves is 35. The maximum the Stoll Curve measures to is 60. Anything said to be higher than 60 TPP is a guess, an extrapolation or wishful thinking. THL is another matter. THL is your “breathability.” The NFPA minimum for bunker coat and pants is 205 and there really is no maximum. There is, however, normally an inverse relationship between TTP and THL…when one goes up and the other goes down. Another consideration regarding TPP and THL is that we only test swatches of composite materials, not the whole garment. In real world use, the whole garment has quite a few places of “second layers.”
Consider your reflective material, pockets and tabs. While your TPP may be increased in those layer places, your THL will be reduced. Wearing self-contained breathing apparatus (SCBA) is wearing another layer (or more) in certain places. I think our protection from the fire/heat has reached the peak of what is practical and safe. Considering that half of the TPP number is the time to second-degree burn; consider if you had a 60 TPP rated set on and went into a fire until you started to feel the second-degree burn. Imagine how deep in you would be and how long it would take to get out. With the time to flashover coming faster now than ever before, we need to be more cognizant about our gear and how much protection we can realistically expect from it.
Heads up
Helmet retirement always seems to evoke some emotions on behalf of firefighters. The integrity of the helmet can only be tested through destructive tests. Any material the helmet is constructed of degrades with each thermal exposure. Kevlar and fiberglass helmet materials degrade with UV exposure. The improvements of prior standards can be assured to be in the helmet the firefighter is using. As a comparison: The National Athletic Equipment Reconditioners Association reconditions/recertifies approximately 1.7 million athletic helmets yearly and will not recondition/recertify any helmet 10 years of age or older. Their 10 years is determined by the manufacturer’s date of initial season of use. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) 1910.135(b)(1)(i) and American National Standards Institute (ANSI) statute Z89.1-2009 direct that the longest a hard hat should be in service is four to five years from date of manufacture.
Helmets have also seemed to have evolved to a point of maximum protection. One concern voiced was over the lack of an internal temperature criteria or test. While a helmet protects your head from impact, we need to ensure that it is also protected from heat. While internal temperature measurement of firefighting helmets hasn’t yet gathered any traction, I suspect it will at a later date.
One user-specific issue that has been brought forward is the size of the hood face opening and how it affects usage in the staged position and as deployed during SCBA use. Development of a test that allows a larger hood-face opening, while maintaining the seal around the SCBA facemask is in the works. This would allow the hood to be worn staged around the larger size neck without the choking feeling that often occurs and also would prevent the hood from creeping down the SCBA mask face shield, which often interferes with the firefighter’s field of vision.
Cancer Concerns
There is credible scientific evidence that firefighters get certain cancers in higher percentages than the general public. You can hardly go a day without an email or a line-of-duty death (LODD) notification that involves cancer. With the increasing awareness of cancer, the committee is investigating ways to reduce the firefighter’s risk of contamination by the cancer causing carcinogens produced by fire.
The hood interface between the collar, earflaps and helmet is the only place on the firefighter ensemble that does not have any type of moisture barrier on it. This area also contains the second-most absorbent area on the body, the area below the angle of the jaw. Does the hood need a moisture barrier? Or, does the hood need some type of barrier to prevent permeation of the cancer causing carcinogens produced by the fire? Can we find a product to put on the outside of the hood to prevent pass-through of the particles? The committee formed a task group to investigate the issue, identify problems and formulate potential solutions. Once these three parts of the process are accomplished, the committee can come up with a minimum spec and testing for the product/item.
Evidence of the problem of the hood interface area was noted in “Evaluation of Dermal Exposure to Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons in Fire Fighters” Report No. 2010-0156-3196 December 2013 by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Centers for Disease Control and Prevention National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH). One of their conclusions was that firefighters wearing full ensembles absorb polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) into their bodies. The report states that PAHs most likely entered the firefighters’ bodies through the skin, with the neck being the primary site of exposure and absorption due to the lower level of skin protection afforded by hoods.
The International Association of Fire Fighters (IAFF) LODD statistics show that by the age of 60, twice as many firefighters die from cancer than cardiac arrest! Some of the most common cancers found in firefighters and their respective incidence compared to the general population are:
Testicular cancer 102%
Multiple Myeloma 52%
Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma 51%
Skin cancer 39%
Brain cancer 32%
Prostate cancer 28%
Colon 21%
Leukemia 14%
Dirty gear and burned up helmets are not a badge of honor anymore! Care, maintenance, contamination, carcinogens and cancer; these are all subjects that, if not already, should be increasingly on every firefighter’s radar, from Chief to tailboard. At the NFPA 1971 and 1851 Committees, along with keeping up with the advances in technology and addressing the concerns of end users, we are trying to address some prevalent aspects of carcinogen contamination and its relationship to the increasing cancer occurrences among firefighters.
Set up as Sidebar
The Stoll Curve
Most everyone knows what TPP is, but do you know how we got there?
Alice Stoll and Maria Chianta conducted burn injury research on “sailors, pigs and rats” in the late 1950s and early 1960s at the Aerospace Medical Research Department, Naval Air Development Center. Sailors of the U.S. Navy volunteered to be burned on their forearms for a weekend pass. Stoll and Chianta used heat exposures on human and animal skin to determine the level of heat energy that would create a second-degree burn. For their work, they defined a second-degree burn as the point at which a blister forms, which is the point at which the outer layer of human skin, the epidermis, is destroyed. The Stoll and Chianta data was presented in a landmark paper in 1969 and was later used to create the “Stoll Curve,” which quantifies the level of heat and the duration of time required for a second-degree burn for a wide range of exposure conditions.
