Wildfire firefighters, unmasked in toxic smoke, are getting sick and dying

The smoke from the wildfires that burned through Los Angeles in January smelled like plastic and was so thick that it hid the ocean. Firefighters who responded developed instant migraines, coughed up black goo and dropped to their knees, vomiting and dizzy.

Seven months later, some are still jolted awake by wheezing fits in the middle of the night. One damaged his vocal cords so badly that his young son says he sounds like a supervillain. Another used to run a six-minute mile and now struggles to run at all.

Fernando Allende, a 33-year-old whose U.S. Forest Service crew was among the first on the ground, figured he would bounce back from his nagging cough. But in June, while fighting another fire, he suddenly couldn’t breathe. At the hospital, doctors discovered blood clots in his lungs and a mass pressing on his heart. They gave him a diagnosis usually seen in much older people: non-Hodgkin lymphoma, an aggressive cancer.

It would be unthinkable for urban firefighters – those American icons who loom large in the public imagination – to enter a burning building without wearing a mask. But across the country, tens of thousands of people who fight wildfires spend weeks working in toxic smoke and ash wearing only a cloth bandanna, or nothing at all.

Wildfire crews were once seasonal laborers who fit in deployments between other jobs. Now, as the United States sees more drought and extreme heat, forest fires are starting earlier in the year, burning longer and expanding further. Firefighters often work almost year-round.

And many of them are getting very sick.

Some struggle to walk up a flight of stairs after seasons spent in smoke. Others have become permanently disabled after breathing in concentrated plumes of ash, fungus or poison oak. They are getting cancer in their 20s, developing heart disease in their 30s, waiting for lung transplants in their 40s.

For decades, studies have consistently linked higher wildfire smoke exposure to increased cardiovascular and lung issues, cancer and premature death. The Forest Service’s own researchers have warned for years about the effects of smoke, calling on the agency to provide masks, monitor exposures and track long-term health outcomes for firefighters.

Countries with major wildfire seasons, including Canada, Australia and Greece, have begun to hand out half-face respirator masks with replaceable filters. In laboratory tests, they block about 99% of the toxic particles in smoke. Disposable N95 masks are nearly as effective.

But year after year, the Forest Service sends crews into smoke with nothing to prevent them from inhaling its poisons. The agency has fought against equipping firefighters with masks. It issues safety handbooks that make no mention of the long-term hazards of smoke exposure. And its workers are not allowed to wear masks on the front line, even if they want to.

The agency said in a statement that it wanted to protect its crews but masks posed too great a risk that firefighters would overheat while doing the strenuous work needed to contain a wildfire. Instead, supervisors are supposed to move them out of heavy smoke and set up sleeping camps in cleaner air when possible.

“Respirators are a potential tool to reduce smoke exposure, but regulatory and logistical challenges make widespread use impractical,” the statement read.

Researchers in countries already using masks told the New York Times that they had not seen an increase in cases of heatstroke. Firefighters will slow down or remove the masks when they get too hot, they said.

Internal records, studies and interviews with current and former agency officials reveal another motivation: Embracing masks would mean admitting how dangerous wildfire smoke really is.

That could lead to a cascade of expensive changes. The agency, already underfunded and understaffed, might have to add crews to allow for more breaks, or pay for them to sleep in hotels. Recruitment for the grueling, low-paying jobs could become harder. Spending could increase on an extensive range of health issues among workers and veterans.

“We need to be honest about what people are signing up for,” said Julian Affuso, who oversaw wildfire risk management for the Forest Service until he retired two years ago. “We’re lying to our people, and we’re lying to the public.”

About 40,000 Americans fight wildfires for a living. The largest share work for the Forest Service, which carries the most prestige and has the greatest influence on safety standards across the industry. The rest work for a handful of other federal and state agencies or for private contractors.

The job attracts people who thrive on pushing themselves to their physical limits. Crews bushwhack deep into the forest, carrying upward of 50 pounds of gear, to create what is called the fire line. They cut and burn anything that might feed the flames and, using specialized axes, scrape past roots to reach layers of mineral soil that won’t ignite. Firefighters can work 24 hours straight building this line. Afterward, they often crawl into sleeping bags laid out in dirt. Every two weeks, they take a mandatory short break, and then can be sent back in.

Interspersed with the intense work are long, quieter stretches when crews watch the fire to make sure it doesn’t jump the line – a time when firefighters in other countries often put on masks but Americans do not.

“None of us really have any information about the inherent risks,” said Jacob Dale, a 30-year-old firefighter in Oregon who said he had developed precancerous nodules in his lungs.

Bandannas shield against heat and flying ash and don’t restrict breathing. But they also don’t filter out the most dangerous part of smoke: fine particulate matter. These tiny particles can travel deep into lungs, enter the bloodstream and harm the body.

The risk can feel abstract, though, especially to new recruits, who sometimes join right out of high school for $15 an hour. Many start with just five days of training.

“They treat you like cannon fodder,” said Zack MacMillan, who said he went to the emergency room in Colorado at age 27 after working in smoke so thick that he needed a flashlight to see where he was walking. He left firefighting and said he now has trouble catching his breath.

“Imagine the shortage of workers if they were being completely honest about the hazards,” MacMillan said.

The illness firefighters fear most is cancer. Researchers have found at least 31 carcinogens in wildfire smoke, along with other harmful particles.

“There are so many of us getting sick like this,” said Adrian Hahn, who was diagnosed with a brain tumor at 45, after years of firefighting for the Forest Service.

In public comments and conversations with advocacy groups, the Forest Service has tended to dismiss cases like this as tragic outliers. The agency did not act on 25 years of recommendations that it track the long-term health of its crews, so there is no definitive tally of wildland firefighters who have suffered smoke-related illness.

But narrower studies repeatedly have shown a connection between wildfire work and illness.

The Times reviewed dozens of scientific papers and spoke with more than 250 wildland firefighters, supervisors and agency officials. Nearly all said the same thing: Smoke damage isn’t the exception; it is part of the job.

It was once thought that smoke from burning trees was basically benign, like a campfire. Then, in 1988, thousands of firefighters developed breathing problems as they fought back a monthslong fire in Yellowstone National Park. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sent a team to investigate.

Their researchers found that the crews were breathing in a mix of carcinogens and other harmful chemicals. The CDC advised the Forest Service to ban bandannas – which offer “no degree of protection.” The CDC said the Forest Service should equip crews with respirator masks. The agency rejected that advice and commissioned more studies.

The Forest Service asked its own researchers how to better protect firefighters, and they came back with the same recommendation again and again: Give them masks.

Still, Forest Service leadership held off.

Of the last seven Forest Service chiefs, only one – Dale Bosworth – agreed to speak with the Times. He said that in retrospect, firefighters should have been given masks to wear when possible, but at the time, he worried crews would reject them.

“It’s something else to pack around, and it’s hard to breathe,” said Bosworth, who retired in 2007. He said agency leaders had not really understood the health risks.

But George Broyles, a former firefighter who became a smoke researcher for the Forest Service, is among more than two dozen current and former Forest Service officials who told the Times they believe the agency willfully resisted acknowledging that smoke was dangerous.

“They didn’t want to know, because then they’d have to do something,” he said.

The federal Department of Labor, which sets workplace safety standards nationwide, stepped in a half-century ago to protect urban firefighters – over their objections.

Until the 1970s, those firefighters rarely wore masks. Then the Labor Department began requiring sealed masks and compressed air tanks. Firefighters immediately protested, according to Jonathan Szalajda, who helped oversee the regulation of masks at the CDC until he retired this year.

“They said, ‘It’s going to destroy the industry,’” he said. “But then they just modified their way of working.”

Since the requirement went into place, elevated cancer rates in urban firefighters have dropped. “But you need the requirement first,” Szalajda said. “Until there’s a requirement, things are going to stay pretty much the way they are.”

After many years of fine-tuning, the Labor Department formally proposed a requirement last year that wildfire crews be given masks.

In a series of tense video meetings that have not been previously reported, Forest Service officials pushed to kill the mandate, according to three people with knowledge of the meetings who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss internal deliberations.

The National Wildfire Coordinating Group, an association made up of state and federal wildfire agencies and steered in part by the Forest Service, noted that the new safety standards might be ruinously expensive.

In its statement, the Forest Service said it wanted the rules to be more “flexible” and “reflect the unique conditions of wildland firefighting.”

Labor Department officials initially held firm to the requirement, but they are now under pressure from the Trump administration to roll back workplace safety regulations.

In 2022, Congress granted federal firefighters workers’ compensation coverage for more than a dozen kinds of cancer as well as COPD, heart attack and stroke. The law was intended to spare them from having to prove a connection between these illnesses and their years fighting fires. But this year, the Trump administration cut the administrative staff, leading to confusion and long waits for approvals.

The claim submitted by Allende, who was diagnosed with a qualifying cancer after the Los Angeles fires this year, has been delayed. Allende spent July hunting down paperwork. Without the paycheck and health coverage that workers’ compensation would provide, he kept putting off his second round of chemotherapy while trying to find a doctor who would take his limited insurance.

“I don’t know why they make it so hard. I’m sick and already tired and overwhelmed,” Allende said. “I always just trusted the agency to take care of us.”

A couple weeks ago, Allende finally went in for his second round of treatment. He had decided to shoulder the costs because he could not risk waiting for workers’ compensation. But the doctors sent him home. The tumor in his chest had grown “huge,” they said, and he would need to return so he could be hospitalized to undergo a five-day regimen.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.