Station 1902

[00:00] Ed Mann: Foreign welcome our returning listeners and thank you for your continued support. To our first and to our first time listeners, welcome to the show. Ahmed Mann, Director of training and education for Provident Insurance.

[00:27] Today I have Jeff Pauley as our guest, the fire group manager for the Pacific Point Consulting.

[00:35] Welcome to the show, Jeff. Introduce yourselves to our listeners.

[00:40] Jeff Pauley: Sure, Ed. Thanks for having me.

[00:43] I've been involved in the fire service as a volunteer for many, many years.

[00:49] My career in the fire service started in 2010 after a long career in law enforcement when I was asked by our county fire chief who knew my background to go to school in.

[01:06] We were in Virginia to go to school as a learn to be a fire investigator and to come work for him. And so I did that the fall of 2010 and worked there for about eight or nine, 10 years and then moved down to North Carolina,

[01:25] worked for a large private fire investigation company for about five years and stopped doing that because my knees,

[01:37] you know, getting down is easy, but getting back up, it can be challenging. So my knees are not that of a young man. So now I just do other things to keep the passion going.

[01:50] Ed Mann: Well, Jeff, when I read your bio,

[01:53] I couldn't help but see that your passion is for occupational health and safety. How about explaining to our listeners why this become has become one of your life's passions?

[02:03] Jeff Pauley: Absolutely. So what? I of course I knew absolutely nothing before I went to the Virginia Fire Marshal Academy and they taught us about appropriate PPE to be wearing at the post fire scene.

[02:19] And I got back to the shop and work and the guy who was our fire marshal who had been around for many years at a couple different departments, I showed up wearing the PPE that I was taught to do.

[02:34] And of course his first words are what are you wearing all that for?

[02:38] So I explained it to him and in a nutshell, a couple years later, in the fall of 2020, 2013,

[02:45] he was diagnosed with occupational cancer and he was dead by February of the following year. So I,

[02:56] in looking around during those times was aware of the fact that there were a lot of fire investigators, public and private, who were not taking the steps that they could be taking and should be taking to protect their health.

[03:14] And you know, the, the goal is to live a long and happy retirement and, and you have to take care of yourself now. And so it just, it just started from there.

[03:26] And then in 2016 the I re instituted it, fallen by the wayside a number of years before, but reinstituted their health and safety committee. So I was appointed to that and then took over the chairmanship in 2018 and did that for six years and learned an awful lot about it.

[03:54] And the fact that there are many, many, many persons, not just fire investigators, but a lot of people who are not aware of the health hazards regarding the post fire environment.

[04:09] Ed Mann: So that's a great lead into my next question. So while many of our listeners understand the risk of developing occupational cancer,

[04:18] I'm sure some still have not received or want to believe the statistics. I say this because I constantly see pictures and videos of firefighters, investigators and others working in smoke or the post fire environment without any kind of respiratory protection or any kind of PP at all.

[04:39] What do you think we need to do in order to get the non believers on board with the message and start taking the steps to protect themselves?

[04:48] Jeff Pauley: Yeah, that's a great question and it's a challenging question because I've had the same experiences and I,

[05:00] we, we, we can't do enough education. You know, one of the, one of the challenges in, in,

[05:06] you know, and we called it, you know, fire one and Fire two, that they're different class names of the class around the country, but your basic fire classes. And, and some are doing a great job of getting the message to the folks right up front and, and some be doing a lot better.

[05:26] But then we've got the added challenge of the folks that are already in the fire service and we're not doing to the extent we certainly should be the in service level training to get these people to understand just like the new folks.

[05:44] And I don't even want to go into all of the other people who show up at fire scenes. Let's just, let's just talk about the fire service for a minute.

[05:52] I mean,

[05:53] I mean the heat's bad for you, the smoke is very bad for you, but the health hazards, the gases and the particulates extend far out from the fire scene.

[06:10] We define the fire scene in three categories. The hot scene, or excuse me, the hot zone is whatever's burning, the debris field and the collapse zone, the warm extends out past that.

[06:25] And that's defined by what I call the soot print,

[06:30] which is a term that I coined and is well used within the fire investigation community these days. But you know, smoke goes up into this in the sky. And what is smoke?

[06:40] It's partially burned carbonaceous material.

[06:44] Depending on a lot of environmental factors, it eventually cools and falls back to the ground. So it's falling around whatever's burning. I don't care if it's a car or a 10 story structure, but depending on the wind direction and speed, it can extend well out.

[07:02] Well,

[07:03] you can't see those particulates.

[07:06] The ones that are the baddest for you are so small that you cannot see them. And so there's a false sense of security. And then you go to the, when the fire's out and the big red box or whatever color is in your community, they're gone.

[07:26] You know, it's later the same day, the next morning, two or three days later, whatever. And you have what I call blue sky syndrome. You know, the roofs burned off the structure, a couple exterior walls are burned, missing.

[07:39] It's a beautiful blue sky day. There's nothing to tell your brain that there are health hazards, but they're still there. And while most gases, with the notable exception of formaldehyde, which can stick around for several days, most gases dissipate within a few hours.

[07:56] So the remaining is the particulates. And those do not go away until the scene is either cleaned up or destroyed. So you show up and there's nothing to tell your brain that there's a hazard.

[08:08] So you start going into the scene. I don't care if you're an insurance adjuster or a fire investigator or an attorney or the remediation folks, those scenes can have serious health issues present that are going to affect people or can affect people well down the road.

[08:27] Ed Mann: So to your, to your point about the, the folks that are already on the job, I'll share a story with you and our listeners.

[08:35] I did a cancer risk reduction class a couple of years ago in a career department and there was an older, salty captain in the class. And about an hour into the class, he said, you know, listen to me, Sonny.

[08:48] He said, you know, I've been doing this for 20 plus years and you know, it's too late for me to worry about it now. And I said, well, you know, Cap, you,

[08:56] you might be right, but let me pose a couple of questions to you.

[09:01] After September 11, there were a lot of people that worked the rubble pile in New York and a lot of people got cancers,

[09:10] but there was also a fair number of people that worked out rebel pile that as of today, still don't have any cancers.

[09:20] And then the next question to them was, do you know anybody who has smoked most of their adult life and never develop lung cancer, but an individual that's never touched a cigarette that's developed lung cancer?

[09:33] And if his answer to the question was yes, I said, well, there you go, Cap, you know, if you don't have it by now, why not take the rest of your career and protect yourself.

[09:42] And you might be one of those individuals that never gets cancer. And he agreed with me.

[09:50] And sometimes we just have to try to make it personal with the individual to get them to fully understand just what the hazard is and become believers.

[10:02] So, Jeff, you spent a great.

[10:03] Jeff Pauley: Yeah, the, the observations. One,

[10:07] there's this thing called individual susceptibility.

[10:12] So you and I can start on the job today. We go to the same number of fires,

[10:18] suppression, investigation, whatever, it doesn't matter. We do it for 20 plus years, we retire, I get cancer and die, you don't. You know, my body is different than your body and my DNA makeup is different than yours.

[10:30] And you can't. There's no way to, to test it or measure it or predict.

[10:36] So individual susceptibility went in his favor. That's great.

[10:40] But we all have an obligation, in my humble opinion, to set an example for everybody else. And so the folks who have been around and either it hasn't caught up to them yet, or maybe they dodged the bullet, they still have an obligation as a member of the fire service to set a positive example,

[11:02] which means wearing the PPE that you should be wearing at every scene.

[11:07] Ed Mann: I agree with you.

[11:09] So, Jeff, you've spent a great deal of your time,

[11:13] of your career involved with fire and arson investigators through a variety of national and international organizations.

[11:20] What's your message to those people who work in that environment after the fire's out and the fire apparatus has left the scene?

[11:28] Jeff Pauley: Anybody going to the post fire scene to work in the warmer hot zones? If you're out, you're well away, you're upwind, you're in the cold zone, that's fine, do what you want to do.

[11:39] But if you are in the warm or the hot zone of those post fire scenes,

[11:47] an investigator, a crime scene tech, a police officer, there's a long list, attorneys, the canine handlers. Technically they're called ignitable liquid detection canines. Ildc, I call them fire dogs. And they're handlers,

[12:04] insurance people, remediation people, all of that.

[12:09] The health hazards have not magically gone away because the fire is out.

[12:15] Dr. John Simbala, who I believe is in the engineering department at Penn State,

[12:22] he did a study a few years ago, said the human eye can detect particles down to about 70 microns, which is about the thickness of a hair if it's light scattering.

[12:34] So it's in a beam of light coming through a window or whatever, maybe down to 10.

[12:40] The ones that we're talking about are less than 1 micron,

[12:46] you cannot see them. They're there.

[12:50] You have to recognize that they are there. And protect yourself with appropriate ppe, which means two things.

[13:00] Adequate and appropriate respiratory protection and covering as much of your bare skin as possible to limit dermal absorption. Because when that stuff gets on your skin that you cannot see it's there, it will absorb into your skin and present problems potentially down the road.

[13:25] So you know, ounce of protection is, is better than a pound of cure. Right. So we just to do a whole lot better protecting ourselves up front which is important because we don't know what may or may not occur at some time in the future.

[13:43] And that could be a very long time.

[13:46] Leukemia form of blood cancer can appear in as little as three or four years. Lung cancer on the other hand can take 25 or 30 years to rear its ugly head.

[13:59] And you can't go backwards. We have to protect ourselves now in order to help what may or may not happen in the future.

[14:08] Ed Mann: So not to put you on us, you mentioned respiratory protection as an absolute minimum. What do you recommend?

[14:17] Jeff Pauley: That's an interesting question. So the minimum recommended, and this is out of the IAAI's third edition fire investigator health and safety best practices but it applies to everybody. The minimum that we should be wearing is a P100 filter which means 100% of the particulates down to 0.3 microns and a cartridge that addresses oily vapors,

[14:47] acid gases and formaldehyde.

[14:50] That is. That's the short of scba.

[14:54] That's the best. And it's.

[14:57] There are air purifying respiration respirators. Excuse me, there are powered air purifying respirators. But let's look at this from a slightly different perspective.

[15:08] If you don't have that or you can't afford that or your employer won't provide it for you.

[15:14] N95 masks are around and cheap and easy to come by. If you've been wearing Nothing.

[15:22] Wearing an N95 is, is more much better than nothing. It's not ideal, it's not the best, but something is better than nothing. There are you we see in the wildland a lot of times they're wearing bandanas.

[15:36] Those don't do a thing. But if you can at least wear an N95.

[15:42] And now with the caveat the fire's out, the gases have dissipated. So we're talking three days after and you're just going into do a look around or work after that three day post fire window.

[15:58] P100 is better by far. But if, if, if all you got is available to use N95 then, then something's better than nothing. But P100 the P does not mean particulate.

[16:11] It means.

[16:13] Well, it used to mean oil proof. They've changed the definition slightly. Strongly or highly resistant to oil I believe is the current wording. But short of SCBA P100 and then if you're less than three days post fire, the,

[16:31] the cartridge that covers formaldehyde, orly vapors, acid gases.

[16:37] Ed Mann: Okay, good information. So you had mentioned before we started today you had done something for the National Cancer Registry.

[16:46] Jeff Pauley: So let's.

[16:48] Ed Mann: Why do you believe that the National Cancer Registry is so important to the U.S. fire Service? Why should people get on board and get registered?

[16:57] Jeff Pauley: In spite of what the name implies, it is for more than just firefighters.

[17:04] Technically, it's the National Firefighter Registry for cancer. It's for everybody in the fire service. So let's get that out of the way. First.

[17:12] Everybody in the fire service needs to register and when you register, it documents some personal information which is highly, highly protected and it documents your work history.

[17:27] So that registry talks electronically to the cancer registries in all 50 states because the medical professions are required to report cancer diagnoses to their state registry.

[17:45] So the, that then links and we can then start to draw a correlation between incidents of cancer and members of the fire service.

[17:57] We've got over a million people,

[18:01] roughly 70% volunteer in the fire service in the US and we need to. The more people that register,

[18:12] the more data there is and the better information will come out from that so that we have a better understanding and a more thorough understanding of the cancer issue in the U.S.

[18:31] fire Service.

[18:33] Ed Mann: Well, I couldn't agree with you more. A year ago I was having lunch with a group of fire fire chiefs and we got to talking about and two of them that are pretty, you know, pretty sharp fellow said, well, I'm not doing it because I'm not, I'm not putting my medical information into something like that.

[18:51] And they were myth or confused when I told them, well, you don't put any medical information in it.

[18:59] You're not sharing your medical information with anybody. They're basically asking you tell us what you've done in the fire service and where you've done it at. And if you've been with one organization your entire career, it's pretty easy.

[19:13] Now like myself, it took me a while to register because of being in the military and being assigned to different military installations with different jobs and volunteering in different states along my my career, it took me a little longer to put it all in there.

[19:29] But, you know, the other thing that I see with it, Jeff, is, is that ultimately it will help people overcome all these issues that we seem to have with cancer presumption laws.

[19:43] You know, states have cancer presumption laws, but there's always people that fight that presumption, even though there's a presumption law in place. So the more data we have, the easier it becomes to fight those fights.

[19:57] You know, it help and identify clusters of certain types of cancers in certain areas of a state perhaps you know, throws up little red flags. It's kind of like, okay, why,

[20:11] why are there 50 people in this region of Pennsylvania that have all served at the same time, all have the same type of cancer? What happened there, it just opens the door for more research,

[20:28] better data, and in the end it helps everybody. And, and it's easy to do. I just,

[20:36] and I think the last time I talked to the folks at niosh, they make, they made some progress with it, but we still have a long way to go.

[20:46] Jeff Pauley: Yeah, I, I believed, I'm not positive. I believe the last number I heard was somewhere around 20,000, but that that's a drop in the bucket compared to 1.1 million.

[20:57] Ed Mann: I certainly agree with you. So well, Jeff, as we draw near the end of the podcast, do you have any final words of wisdom or advice for our listeners?

[21:09] Jeff Pauley: Host Fire scenes are very unhealthy places. I don't care if it's a vehicle fire, a room in contents, or the roof is burned off the structure. There are health hazards that you cannot see that you should be protecting yourself from all the time.

[21:31] Ed Mann: Well, thank you sir. So I want to thank you for spending time with us today. I'm hopeful our listeners will take some helpful nuggets from our discussion and put them to use to protect themselves.

[21:44] To our listeners, Jeff will be my guest on March 25th at 7:00pm Eastern Standard Time for our monthly live webinar. This is titled the Fire is Out. What's the Issue?

[21:57] If you're involved in any way with sending people to work at a post fire scene or you go to them yourself, this webinar would be for you to sign up for the webinar and view our previously recorded webinars.

[22:12] Visit the link in our episode notes that will accompany this podcast.

[22:17] Share this podcast with your colleagues. You can send them our subscription link which will also be found in the show notes.

[22:25] Lastly, lastly to our listeners, if you have any questions or need additional information or if you have an idea for a future webinar or podcast, please email us at info provident ins.com station 1902 signing off.

[22:44] Until next time, stay safe for your family safety.