Study looks at toll on firefighters

Study of firefighters shows toll job takes

BOISE, Idaho — Randy Brooks’ son had a request three years ago: What could his dad do to make wildland firefighting safer?

To Brooks, a professor at the University of Idaho’s College of Natural Resources who deals with wildland firefighting, it was more of a command.

The result of the conversation was an online survey that drew some 400 firefighters, who mostly identified mental and physical fatigue as the primary cause of injuries to firefighters.

But a self-selecting online survey is not necessarily representative of what’s happening in the field. So Brooks decided to apply some science.

That led to an ongoing health-monitoring study involving wrist-worn motion monitors and body composition measurements. The study found that health declined and reaction times among firefighters deteriorated as the season progressed.

“A lot of them face peer pressure to perform all the time,” Brooks said. “Others feel pressured to protect natural resources and structures at all costs.”

The firefighters also wore a wrist device called a Readiband from a company called Fatigue Science. The device keeps track of how many hours of sleep a person gets. Formulas developed by the U.S. military then calculate fatigue, based on a lack of sleep. That’s used to predict alertness and reaction times, which get worse as fatigue levels rise.

Firefighters in the field can get as little as six hours of sleep or less each night. The devices found that not only did reaction times falter as firefighters remained longer on a fire before getting a mandatory break, Brooks said, but firefighters also tended to take longer to recover as the season progressed. Sometimes, fatigue reached a level suggesting that reaction times slowed down so much it took firefighters twice as long to react.

Brooks said his initial thoughts are that wildland firefighters might need better nutrition to stay fit and mentally sharp. But last year’s study had only nine firefighters. This year, he has expanded the study to 18 firefighters, 16 men and two women. They’re smokejumpers, meaning they parachute from airplanes to fight fires.

Brooks said that next year he hopes to have about 100 firefighters and include hotshot crews, which are made up of ground-based wildland firefighters who, like smokejumpers, can be deployed on a national basis.

Ringo H.W. Chiu The Associated Press Firefighters keep watch Aug. 9 over a fire in the Cleveland National Forest in Lake Elsinore, Calif. A professor whose son is a firefighter is researching what can be done to make the job safer.