Hannah Dreier:
That’s right. I mean, any other kind of firefighter, it would be unthinkable that they would go into a burning building without that mask and compressed air tank that we all know so well.
But for these guys who are out fighting wildfires, they are not supposed to wear masks. They’re told not to wear masks, even if they want to go and buy their own. And the Forest Service, which employs most of the wildfire firefighters, says that that’s because they worry about heat stress. They worry that, if these guys had masks on, they might get heatstroke.
But, in other countries, wildland firefighters now do wear masks, and there have not been upticks and heatstroke at all. We have internal documents where the Forest Service is saying, if these people wore masks, they might be less productive. They might not work. They might work only 80 percent as hard as they’re working now.
And people who have worked in the agency say that that’s part of what is actually going on here. We also talk to people who spent years at the agency, and they say that if the Forest Service were to allow firefighters to wear masks, it would mean admitting that smoke is dangerous. And that could cause a huge rethinking of the whole way the agency works right now.
It could be very expensive. They could have to take lots of other steps to protect these guys from smoke exposure and ultimately hire more crews and spend more money.
