“... ONLY GOD KNOWS HOW LONG I’LL BE AROUND TO HELP.”
Mark Rine, a Columbus firefighter diagnosed with cancer who is working to save his comrades of firefighter deaths from cancer. In September, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Firefighter Cancer Registry Act, a bill meant to help log and address cancer in the ranks.
If the bill is eventually approved, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would be required to create the registry and study the effects of cancer for volunteer and career firefighters.
The bill is now making its way through the Senate.
Since 1990, nearly 200 Boston firefighters have died of cancer. There is a new cancer diagnosis in Finn’s department every three weeks.
Because of this, Finn takes a hard-line stance with his firefighters if they are not following strict cancer-prevention rules that he’s implemented.
“I tell my captains and my district chiefs, if I see a guy not wearing his SCBA (selfcontained breathing apparatus) during overhaul, I will write you up,” he said. “I’ve told them all and they know it.”
The cancer threat is an even bigger issue in other countries where some firefighters run into massive fires wearing street clothes. Col. Cassio Roberto Armani, commander for the Sao Paulo State Fire Department in Brazil, came to Boston to get ideas and help for his department.
Fire recently engulfed a 19thcentury railway station in Sao Paulo. Hundreds of firefighters rushed to the scene. They didn’t have air tanks on their backs and they wore paper masks.
“We have a cancer problem, too,” he tells Fire Capt. Peter Berger of Hallandale Beach, Florida. “We are dying.”
Berger, like Finn, is a speaker at the Boston conference.
After watching six of his firefighters develop cancer in a department of 67, Berger decided to make prevention his mission.
He went to graduate school at Oklahoma State University and his thesis was cancer in the fire service. He worked with a group of graduate students and experts to survey about 29,000 firefighters across the country in 2014.
Berger’s survey found that 40 percent of those 29,000 respondents said they had some form of cancer.
About 35 percent said they washed their gear after a large fire. Nearly 90 percent said Mark Rine warms up his son’s seventh-grade football team before a game at Johnstown-Monroe High School. His son Cohen, wearing No. 11, plays for Granville Middle School and his dad helps coach. Mark Rine tightens the chin strap on the helmet of Cohen, his seventh-grade son, before a football game.
they’ve seen peers not properly wearing their gear.
“You’ve been given the awareness, you are aware of the problem,” Berger tells the room. “Change is a very bad word in the fire service and so is cancer, and both of those are unacceptable.”
On Sept. 26, three months after he spoke in Boston, Berger had surgery to remove cancer on his skin after he noticed a painful growth at the base of his neck.
The skinny freshman quarterback scrambles to his right, avoids two charging linebackers
and flings a perfect spiral 30 yards into the end zone.
“Money,” Mark Rine says quietly, as he watches the ball hurtle through the air and into the waiting hands of the receiver for a touchdown.
Fans of the Granville High School junior-varsity football team roar after Rine’s son, Blake, gives their team the lead.
One football mom near the press box yells down at Rine, who is sitting about 10 rows beneath her.
“Hey, Coach Rine,” she hollers. “Did you teach him that?”
Rine’s smile is as wide as his rain-soaked glasses. The coach for Granville’s middle school football teams walks down to the
sideline to check on some injured players.
The whispers begin.
Rine doesn’t have the answers almost everyone in his life is seeking.
He doesn’t know whether he will get to watch Blake play quarterback for the varsity team or in college someday.
He isn’t sure whether he will be able to coach his son Cohen on the eighth-grade football team next year.
He wonders how many more Bible stories he will read to little Halle or whether he will see his teenage daughter, Shelby, graduate from high school.
He knows only that he is alive today. And hopefully tomorrow.
When he dies, there will be few regrets.
He conquered the demons of his past.
He became a devoted father and husband.
He followed the plan God gave him without questioning it.
He did everything in his power to save his firefighting brothers and sisters.
Now it’s up to them to save themselves.
“Knock and the door will be opened to you”