#65 - Steven "Robbie" Burns & Ian Ray: The Air They Breathe: A Firefighter's Unseen Battle

What happens when those who run toward danger face an invisible, deadly threat long after the flames are extinguished? This compelling episode pulls back the curtain on the shocking occupational health crisis affecting firefighters worldwide.

Stephen "Robbie" Burns and Ian Ray bring decades of fire service experience to share the devastating reality of toxic exposure in firefighting. Having been classified as Class 1 carcinogenic by the World Health Organization, firefighting carries extreme health risks that extend far beyond emergency incidents. The conversation reveals how contamination follows firefighters back to stations, into vehicles, and even home to their families.

Robbie's personal battle with aggressive cancer diagnosed at just 40 years old underscores the human cost of inadequate protection. The pair explain how modern fires burn hotter and more toxic than ever before, while budget constraints prevent many services from implementing known safety measures. Their firsthand accounts paint a picture of how cultural barriers, institutional inertia, and funding disparities create dangerous disparities in protection.

The episode provides eye-opening comparisons to countries like Sweden, where comprehensive prevention measures have dramatically reduced illness rates. Most disturbingly, we learn how firefighters in some regions are now advised to bank sperm at career start due to DNA-altering effects of chronic exposure.

This isn't just about firefighter health—it's about fundamental fairness for those who risk everything to protect us. Whether you work in occupational health, emergency services, or simply care about public safety, this conversation will transform how you think about the true cost of emergency response and the urgent need for systemic change.

Surry Fire & Rescue LinkedIn

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Air Quality in Firefighting
• 8:55 Understanding Risk in Fire Service
• 17:51 Acute vs Chronic Exposure Risks
• 29:57 Post-Fire Contamination Dangers
• 51:37 Cancer Classification and Health Impacts
• 1:06:26 Inadequate Health Monitoring Systems
• 1:19:58 Personal Stories and Advocacy Work
• 1:36:09 Future Solutions and Needed Changes
• 1:55:15 Closing Thoughts and Episode Wrap-up

Transcript

Simon: 0:00

Welcome back to Air Quality Matters. We already have the tools and knowledge we need to make a difference to the quality of the air we breathe in our built environment. The conversations we have and how we share what we know is the key to our success. With Stephen Robbie Burns, watch Manager and Operational Assets Contaminants Lead at Hampshire and Isle of Wight Fire and Rescue Service, and Ian Ray, a Health and Safety Advisor and retired Borough Commander at Surrey Fire and Rescue Service, we talk about air quality through the risk lens quite a bit on this podcast this idea that risk is rarely eliminatable but often mitigatable. Well, one way to explore this subject is to take it to the extreme and peel it back from there. And who better to talk to about risk than the kind of people who are often running in the opposite direction to the rest of us when faced with such risks? Robbie and Ian are passionate advocates in the Fire and Rescue Service for reducing occupational risk to air pollutants. If you stop and just think about it for a second the kind of environments the service puts itself in it doesn't take long to put two and two together. What most of us won't think about is the risk these people are taking in and around and indeed after these events and it's this risk we spend some time unpacking. We work through the exposure risk of the incidents themselves and the surprising exposure levels afterwards. Its impact on fire service members, health and Robbie's own personal story here. This is a fascinating, surprising and, frankly, shocking episode. So much to learn and take away from it, I think, and I can't thank Robbie and Ian enough for taking time out of their day to come up and meet me in London where this episode was recorded. I really hope you enjoy this one. Don't forget to check out the sponsors in the show notes and at airqualitymattersnet.

Simon: 2:27

This is a conversation with Stephen Robbie Burns and Ian Ray. Air quality is also about occupational health, right, because we spend such a large amount of our time at work at work, um. But also we talk about risk. A lot in air quality and risk is one of these intangibles often like, particularly in air quality. Right, because we're talking about air quality impacts for most people, where the the long-term effects of this are very long-term, yeah, and quite remote.

Simon: 3:10

Air quality still remains the single largest environmental risk we face as a human species. That you know. There's no doubt about it. It's important, but most of the time when we're talking about it, I'm talking about risks with people that are in the distance and and we're talking about an invisible thing in the air that for most like in this room now, for most people you can't taste it, it's just you get by, you don't think about it and if you get asthma or copd or cancer down down the line it's probably an accumulation of something over 20 or 30 years. But with the fire service you take that trying to deal with risk to the extreme. I mean literally, when people are running in the opposite direction, there's you charging in the other direction into the fire. So at the extreme end of risk you understand that innately and you've got a lot of training around managing that risk. Otherwise the fire service would have an unbelievable attrition rate of people running into burning buildings, right, um.

Simon: 4:12

But the risk in the fire service, particularly in our conversations that we've had, extends far beyond that initial phase of running into a burning building it's not the end of the picture yeah, and that's what I thought would be interesting to chat to you about to unpack that from the extreme, from that first initial phase of risk to the post-risk, I think anybody that followed 9-11 and things recognises that there are risks that remain in places that have gone through.

Ian: 4:43

We're replicating that with the grand film. We've got all this to come out Completely. Yeah, there's no difference in what's happening now to what was there, just the scale of it.

Simon: 4:53

Yeah, and I guess down at a micro level, right at individual home levels, there are people that you're not only putting fires out but you're also going back in days later to survey them, to make sure they're safe, to do investigations. You're in and around those positions. We're thinking of people in North America at the moment, the fire service there fighting forest fires in and around, burning buildings for long periods of time, well past an emergency, and then we have this long-term occupational risk occupational risk like everybody else faces. You're, you're in and amongst materials that have been left, what's been left? Yeah, so it's a fascinating, I mean. How do I mean?

Simon: 5:36

How do you guys kind of think about risk in general in that way like there's obviously the risk in the moment? I guess make this start there. Clearly you're, as a job, you go into places that most people are running as fast as they possibly can away. How do you countenance that at that extreme level? Is it completely based on training and protocol? Is that is it? Is it that reliance that the guy behind you has got you back? Is it that fundamental?

Robbie: 6:07

I think it is on a base level. I think we are very well trained. We have a unique set of skills and that sounds really cheesy, but we do. We have a unique mindset, the same as individuals that work in medicine, for instance. We've chosen that route. Every little boy wants to be a firefighter? Here we are, so I pinch myself still. Wants to be a firefighter? Um, here we are, so I pinch myself still, to be fair, but we do. I think, um, we trust implicitly the kit we've got. We've been in really hostile environments in a training environment, worst case scenario 600 degrees celsius. You know you would die very quickly if you didn't have this kit on. So we've been trained to the nth degree to use that and utilize that and we have an oppo behind us that will save our life.

Ian: 6:46

So, yeah, it's um a cliche, but absolutely and it's fun yeah, yeah, I agree with what robbie's saying, because we have done that. And when we talk about the risk environment of that, people say, well, that's a highly risk environment. It's, it's quite well risk controlled in actual fact. So we have all the rpe, we have the ppe, we have the procedures, we have a command structure that sits with that. So it's actually quite regimented.

Ian: 7:11

As you're going through, a bit of muscle memory kicks in for all of those when you go to those incidents. But it's if you follow those. You've got all everything in place to do. But when you come out of doing the initial bit of doing whatever you needed to do, whether that be a life saving or a building that you need to protect or whatever then then, like most people, they do the bit that they're really trained for. It's when you come out and then it's I like to call it the new normality of what's happened. So you've had the incident, you, you've dealt with that and that's quite fast and instinctive and training comes in.

Ian: 7:49

Then you come out and what was the original event? The big bang. You've come out to a new normality which is different to what it was before, not only for yourself but for others. So you're coming into a, so now you're dealing with a different set of risk parameters, and for us that's air quality and contaminants and stuff like that. So now you're in a different arena. You're probably in a slowed-down mode. You're probably now your guard has gone down because now your adrenaline's less than it was before. So you're moving in a different environment. Do we train for that environment? You could argue what? Yes, we do, but actually it's easy to drop a guard, or or thinking, well, that's just part of the job. Actually, what we know now is actually that part of the job is just as important as dealing with that first bit. There's there's the acute exposure. The second bit is probably a bit of acute and lots of chronic.

Simon: 8:46

Yeah, and you found a really interesting point there about that. Like a lot of risk. We have kind of acute risk and chronic risk and you could argue that the bit post the event is somewhere in between in a way. But I think the interesting thing about the fire we're talking fire here, but I appreciate that obviously it will come into perhaps some of the other things that you face around traffic accidents. There's all sorts of exposures that the fire service is likely to be exposed to. The hazmat list goes on, to be frank. But we're talking fire because I think people's heads go straight there when we talk about the fire service, go straight there when we talk about the fire service.

Simon: 9:28

I think as humans we have an ability to train for extreme events for short periods of time where you have very rigid protocols.

Simon: 9:35

You have a hierarchies of management that pull you out if there's certain thresholds across of risk, and it it's, you know it's a controlled as an environment as it can be in the chaos that is, yeah, yeah, an emergency right, and so you control that as rigidly as you possibly can because it is an extreme event and then any risk that's left over is an understood risk that every person that is prepared to go into a building understands innately that you can't mitigate, you can't eliminate the risk and the outcomes are potentially deadly. There's always the potential for a building to collapse on you or for something to happen, a failure in equipment or whatever. So you understand that you can protect yourself as much as you can and that's a known risk in that environment because we're talking about kind of air, principally air quality risk here is there because these days I guess every fire you're masked up and you're protected as high as you can. Are you exposing yourself in those in that first scenario, that in the emergency event to risk, or is that fairly limited you?

Robbie: 11:02

think, dynamic. Again, it comes back to culture Traditionally I mean, we've learnt loads more in the last 10 years or so, but traditionally people would walk into a fire as an OIC, as an officer in charge behind the team, without breathing apparatus on, just to check the boys are okay and there's a neutral plane. So the over and under pressurisation creates a neutral part where you can see the fresh air if you like. You can see light underneath that horrible smoky stuff. Yeah, and we would have governors, as they were called literally what we got in there, son. Yeah, it looks all right.

Ian: 11:31

They're all dead now, funnily enough yeah, yeah, the white hat syndrome it used to be called that you're protected if you had a white helmet on. You're an officer in charge?

Simon: 11:38

then yeah, actually you had some invisible cloak of protection around exactly that, and we know that not to be the case.

Robbie: 11:44

So depend on the fire scenario you you referred to north america, um, wildfire is a control that we're really bad at, so we won't put on breathing apparatus. So, for instance, one of my appliances in hampshire and the isle of wight has four breathing apparatus sets on it and a regular sort of calm breath. You're getting about 35 liters a minute, which will last you about an hour if you, if you chill. So people that are operating pumps, people that are not working too physically, um squirting water, that sort of stuff, they will happily let their eyes run and they will cough because they don't want to clean the bloody ba set. So we are, I I would say we are exposed much more than we should. We have the equipment. We often don't default to that equipment from a respirable air point because we're lazy. We're incredibly explosive on a fire ground but we don't want to clean stuff after and it's as as as base as that, unfortunately.

Simon: 12:34

Yeah, that's really interesting. You say that and that for me is quite analogous to asbestos risk in a strange way. If you're a homeowner that lives in a home with asbestos, as long as it's not being disturbed, yeah, you're generally pretty safe, so you're. You're fairly free to drill a hole in a wall or, you know, disturb asbestos and a single exposure in an event is probably going to have a limited risk on you. But if you're an electrician working in an area with high radon, continuous exposure to those high risk events of drilling and working does pose an issue. So even in that first event that you're talking about your guys that are in and around the rigs and and the fire, even if you're not in the event itself, you're repeatedly exposing yourself.

Ian: 13:22

There's, there's huge potential for that to happen In that moment. Yeah, I mean, we do have other risk control measures that we would utilise at that. We have gas detectors and monitors that we'll be monitoring certain bits, but you can't measure the whole gamut of what's coming into you. So for our gas monitors it will measure across five parameters, so that'll give us a good clue that actually that's reasonably safe to be in that area with a cordon. But if you talk about the experience of Robbie and a wildfire and the counties that we both work in, they're quite prevalent during the summer months. How do you now do that in an incident that stretches a mile wide, a whole common where you've got multiple crews working in multiple different areas? Yeah, we could put some BA sets on. Would that be enough because they need to come back? We've got half mask protections that will give us FFP3 particular protection.

Ian: 14:16

You can only wear them for a particular amount of time. They become uncomfortable, they're unusable at that point and actually it stops us doing our jobs at some point. So we would always go. All the stuff is there for you to use, but then we can get to the point where actually, you know I agree with Robbie in some respects, we don't use them. It's a bit like you know where we've got other industries, you know it's all there. It's provided by the employer under the Health and Safety at Work Act. We provide it, you use it. Why don't you use it? Well, now we need to look at culture. We need to look at why we do things, how we do things, what we knew then and what we know now. We know all the publications that are out now. It's telling us that environment is not good for us if we don't do something about it.

Simon: 15:06

So just to backtrack a bit and unpack a couple of things, what you said there. One thing you mentioned was that you, you do have devices that are measuring certain risks. In the moment you said four or five, I think it was. Do you know what they are like?

Ian: 15:17

um, I can't remember them off the top of my head. You've got hydrogen cyanide. It's measuring oxygen levels, carbon dioxide, carbon dioxide, monoxide, monoxide, I'd imagine, sometimes known as the toxic twins, are they?

Simon: 15:29

wearables, or is that just on the rig? They're wearables, they're wearables. So you've got alarms on you that are tracking the things that are going on, not individual, not individual.

Ian: 15:39

One per appliance. So if you've got four firefighters on an appliance, one appliance. So if you've got four firefighters on an appliance, one person will wear it. One person will wear it, or you'll put it on a command point to my entry point, an entry point to measure where your levels are safe in theory.

Simon: 15:53

According to those. That's your safe zone. You're out, so it's not something that goes into the fire, it's. It's a thing that effectively sets your perimeter.

Ian: 15:59

You're safe if we wore them in fires, they'd go off all the time yeah, I was about, was about to say Because you would just have an oxygen-deficient atmosphere and it'll go. We haven't got the right amount of breathable air in here and it would just alarm, so anywhere there's smoke like that. Those detectors won't necessarily be as effective as they would be to find where your boundaries would be, but they are part of the picture that actually goes. Say, we work in an aerial ladder platform, one of our height reach vehicles and we've not got breathing apparatus. We would utilise one of them to note that the people in the cage are safe to be in that cage with that level of respiratory protection.

Robbie: 16:36

It's only about in the last five years, it's fair to say. I agree, and I'm as guilty as an X-Man. I've been in the service for 20 years and I've probably never used them. Quite honestly, I've been off the run now for three years and I've been managing for, you know, years before that, so I didn't necessarily go into a job, so what?

Simon: 16:53

stops. What stops you from using something like that is it. Is it just you forget to turn it on? It's not part of the culture, it just seems like a waste of time. It's just another thing thing to do in a.

Ian: 17:03

I think in the past we wouldn't have had the availability. I agree with Robbie we have now. It's a whole education piece with people. It's culture, it's understanding. It's understanding the readings when they're going and it's no point in having a meter if you don't understand what it's telling you. You know the various different alarm levels.

Robbie: 17:28

What's that actually telling me at this point? What is that what? What is, what is that leading me towards? Data without purpose is just noise. Yeah, and we've. That's been established. Throughout the uk we have a really a close friend of ours, john lord, who is a lead um in most things to do with firefighters cancers, firefighter cancers. He's a prostate cancer sufferer himself um, and it's fair to say, he's done some work around the country and he does as part of his side business. He's asked the question what does this machine do around a mess table? And the guys and girls have gone, you know yeah because it's not embedded and it's not that it.

Robbie: 17:53

And again, you mentioned culture. We are terrible, we are that gun hoe um. You know risk aversion really not. You know, we we are. Unless it happens to us, it's not going to happen to us, and that's really. That's where we need to change that. So we need to instill, and again it comes to for me it comes to discipline and being disciplined in in a number of ways it's your own personal discipline, but if you're not doing what you're meant to do and the policy and procedure says you should do that, somebody senior to you should pull you up on that and have you for it, because that is your health and safety at work act.

Simon: 18:23

Yeah, we're very bad at that yeah, must come on to that kind of culture discipline. Back to that. Be interesting to know if those devices record what they found as well as just alarm you you.

Ian: 18:37

You can go back and get the data, should you wish to do that.

Simon: 18:39

I bet that would be really interesting, because I think there's a lot of learning that could be got out of that If they're turned on like if they're actually deployed. I agree I imagine you could learn some really interesting things from that, and it's quite interesting.

Ian: 18:53

You know, you say data driven. That's where we want to get to as a service. So before we've known some stuff, but we haven't known enough detailed stuff, which is why some of the work moving forward would be to try and get some devices and things like cabs and officers cars, to actually grab the data, to go. This is actually what's happening in this arena. We know it and we're being told it. We can smell it. We can't see it. Data, data, data actually tells us this is what's happening, so we can educate ourselves and we can move forward and go, and the data tells us this. Therefore, we's happening, so we can educate ourselves and we can move forward and go, and the data tells us this. Therefore, we must do this as a risk control.

Ian: 19:29

Yeah, put that in place. Whether that be rpe, whether that be training, education, culture all of the above, for me, is is is big, but it is about, you know, that peer pressure that that robbie's talking about, and our officers. We need to pick it ourselves up on all of this. We can't allow our next door neighbor not to do it. But, yeah, I'm okay. What about you? We're a huge team, we're the biggest team there is. Yeah, um, and we're pretty good at it yeah um.

Robbie: 19:59

So we, we rely on a thing called Eric PD. So I don't know if you've heard of that before, no, so it's eliminate the risk, reduce that, and then isolate the risk and then contain it. And then the pd is ppe, which is one of our last resort. Um shouldn't be used as a control measure, realistically, you know, in the hierarchy of and then the last one, d, is discipline. Um, my fear is that the d is in the wrong place. Say that again. So what is it again? Eric PD? So eliminate, reduce, isolate, contain, and then PPE, discipline.

Simon: 20:34

That's interesting because that's what I think most risk.

Ian: 20:35

People understand as the hierarchy of controls.

Simon: 20:36

Hierarchy exactly which we, you know, in the built environment. We often talk about eliminate substitute engineering controls, which is the same thing.

Ian: 20:45

It's the same thing. It's a wonderful little acronym that we use.

Simon: 20:50

It's appropriate for you all, but I've never heard the discipline part. But I suppose that we talk about administrative controls, which I guess is the discipline, but then PPE comes after. The last form of anything PPE.

Ian: 21:04

Yeah, it's the last form of anything PPE and what we tend to find in our environment is people want to put that right up there. Well, I've got my PPE. No, no, no, it's right down here. There's other things you need to do before that and it's trying to get people to go. Actually, that bit of PPE is not what we want to be. We want to stop it happening for the start, eliminate it. How are we going to? We need to flip some.

Simon: 23:00

Yeah, everyone after that yeah, the the it's a conversation I have a lot with people and that's about the dynamic nature of risk and I suppose none more so. And I know we're kind of stuck on this emergency thing at the moment. It's kind of the start of the pyramid, I suppose, for you guys is risk is dynamic and you're going into environments where you're having to assess and reassess really fast and there's a whole process to that. And you know, and you can apply that dynamism to risk, to all sorts of occupational risks. You know people every day are having to re-evaluate what's important to them, what's presenting the biggest risk. Whether they're doing it subconsciously or consciously, it's something we do as human beings.

Simon: 23:50

So whether you're going into construction sites, you're going from one space to another, or processes are changing in a factory, there's always this, there's this dynamic nature to risk, there's the tolerance level to risk as well, whether you're going to be more vulnerable to it or not. So you know, when we talk about those I don't know the best way to describe them, but maybe the edge risks outside of the burning building risk, it's both human nature and out of necessity sometimes that you've got other things to focus on. You know there are priorities, there's a hierarchy of priorities of risk that you'll face. Yeah, absolutely, and, quite frankly, the deployment of a sensor is probably a lot lower than making sure that the guys that are going in have got the gears fitted properly and all of the other protocols that you protocols that I know you have to go through.

Simon: 24:47

So when we're talking about these environments, that's what I think is so interesting about the extreme nature of it and I imagine it's the same in hazmat situations and others that there's such severe events going on that you have to engineer in all of those other protocols through habit and culture, because if you don't, they're just naturally not going to make it onto the list of shit to do like you're just, you're just never going to get there. In the same way that a home that's managing damp and mold risk if they're struggling to feed their kids and put food on the table, there's the wiping down a bit of mold is probably 10 or 11 on their list of things to worry about that day For sure. That's just the nature of risk, isn't it? I think that's what's so fascinating about this is the lens and taking it to the extreme, that I think you can really see that dynamic nature of it working in real time?

Ian: 25:42

Yeah, and I think we have some controls. So we operate under what we call an instant command system. It's a trident tested system. That actually explains very well what you've just said. There is actually the initial bit. We'll make an ultimate decision by the first person taking up. We're going to do this and this is the reason we're doing it savable life or savable property and we will take this amount of risk to do that. That's, that's in a firefighter maxim that we work towards. So that will be done at a level for a certain level of officer, and you'll get that peak direction.

Ian: 26:12

There's my focus, exactly what you've spoken about. As the incident progresses, you'll probably get another officer come on. That'll then open their lens up a little bit and go okay, you've got that bit. I'll get the next bit. What about the buildings next door? Then the lens will open up. What about the people around us? What about the return to normality? So that incident command system deals with those levels of risk, in effect, and looking at different areas. So we'll do analytical risk assessments every 20 minutes to go. Where are we with this? Where we put safety offices in place, but it's a fire scene or a road traffic collision is not just one pinpoint. You know a bit of focus. It's massive now. So you've got everything and now we're the focus of us. Some of this now is towards this is the why. So the outer, wider picture is now dealing with these, the after effects of us doing that and how we're exposing ourselves and how we can eliminate or reduce that.

Simon: 27:13

And I think there's probably some lessons that can be distilled from that for wider environmentalists and air quality, people in that chain of events and how people coming in behind the initial focus can broaden the scope and the picture. You know, I have, you know, memories of that from the ambulance service where you know you have gold, gold, silver and bronze command and they all have different roles and they all file in. You know, first one is about setting scenes. Second one is about access and egress of ambulances and medical personnel. You know. So there's this process in extreme environments that has to work in a chain of priorities because it's in a street extreme environment.

Simon: 27:53

But I think it's really interesting what you say about those, those kind of the edges of that case that carry risk, particularly from an air quality and an exposure perspective. That probably needs some work, that needs needs addressing. How you do that I don't know, because, as you say, if you're in and around wildfire smoke for three days, yeah, mopping up as a fire officer, you're not going to be wearing full hazmat gear for that period of time. 35 degrees yeah, just not going to happen. And, like you say, even the even tears down from that in FFP3 mask and things like that becoming practical. It's the human element of that.

Simon: 28:30

Yeah, but so the instinct is to stop mitigating that risk rather than have a protocol to deal with. The reality of that situation, isn't it Is? Do I have changes of mass? Do I rotate and change personnel? Is there, you know?

Ian: 28:48

that's the logical approach and all of those have some some, you know challenges in the environment. Whichever service you're in, you know having nobody has the benefit of having another 20 people over here that they can just keep pulling in, because it's that just unfortunately doesn't happen. Years gone by, it might have been where we've got a massive amount of people. We're just not at that level anymore.

Robbie: 29:12

Yeah we used to have six people on the fire appliance, which was wonderful, it was safe and I'm not going to be political about this. But the fact is we have four and in some cases in the UK we have three, which is ludicrous. So four people on a fire appliance limits all you can do, yeah for sure. So if you had five appliances back in the day you'd have resilience in terms of manpower, as we would call it. Um, absolutely not anymore. So that individual is expected to do so much more with so much less. Um, I know we've.

Robbie: 29:41

We've technologized all of our equipment, we've got much better equipment, but the human element of that is we still have to send somebody into a burning building for a prolonged period of time to put the fire out and then a prolonged period of time to keep going through that process, and that individual, if they don't shower within an hour of that exposure event, will be at a much greater risk of of illness, ailment and ultimately death up to seven times more likely. So the risk goes up. If you're at an event for more than four hours we're talking about relief strategies and things seven times more likely to become ill after that four hours, between 5.6 and seven times. So it's an explosive job, as you've already mentioned. You go in, you put the fire out, but when you've come out of that job as we saw at Gren Grenfell all of the firefighters were sat around waiting to go back in.

Robbie: 30:25

And that's where the problem occurs. Because you're hot, your body temperature's raised to 38 40 degrees c. All around you the air is toxic because you're gassing off. Next to me, you're gassing off in front of me, the building's gassing off. The smoke, as we know, 70% of the time blows from the southwest to the northeast in the UK. That 30% of the time it swirls, it does its other thing. So you will naturally, in a built environment, in an 18-storey building around you in London, that smoke will do its own thing. It won't have a natural way to follow. So you will naturally Grenfell. They sat in that smoky environment because that's what they do.

Simon: 30:57

Yeah, there's two things I want to unpack there. The first one and I think we'll talk about this in more detail later on but I think it's worth acknowledging at this point that this is not some esoteric notion of risk we're talking about here. As a firefighter, this is a class one risky profession, like certainly, yeah, maybe explain that to people a little bit. We'll go, I know we'll go into it in a little bit more detail later. But just to set the scene for the context that we're talking about here, this isn't, you know, one in 500 people becoming ill, notably like this is a. This is a. This is a serious a risk as it, an occupational risk as it can get firefighting is casting the genitive.

Robbie: 31:44

Humans at the highest level, as you've said and that's not just you know some make-believe stuff that is a World Health Organization. Massive studies have come to that conclusion in May of 2022. So that's a fact. It is the highest risk you can get and it's obvious. You go into a smoky, burning building with blue and yellow and green smoke. It ain't good for you. It's not respirable air.

Robbie: 32:06

Yeah, and all of the fallout from the three or four hundred different products of combustion that are in that smoky and energy rich gas is going to fall down, it's going to fall on you, it's going to go in your lungs. So, inhalation, absorption, ingestion and dermal injection. We know that the absorption part our body temperature rises to something like 39 degrees c, but ear temperature is about 42. So our lymphatic system here raises to about 42 degrees c, external skin temperature, which makes it 400 more absorbent. So all of that sweaty glands are, you know, all the sweaty parts of our body and then absorb it hideous amounts of toxins that are in that air. Um, seen and unseen. So vapors, gases and particles less than uh 2, 2.5 parts per billion and they are coming into our body essentially because we are sweating, so it's a natural event. Our body is sweating because we've put the ppe on, which is, you know, one of our protective devices. We are almost sitting ducks, um, in that environment.

Simon: 33:00

It's not the fire that's going to kill us, it absolutely is all the other stuff, and the statistics are hideous yeah, so we'll come on, but I thought it was a really good point to pause on that, because when we're when we're talking about the, the next question I had about people sitting in and around those risks, it's in the, it's in I'm guessing it's in the. Is it in the general knowledge of fire people that this is a risk? Do you think? Are people getting it? Is it understood?

Ian: 33:31

I think we're starting to get it. I think we're not at the start of the journey. The start of the journey was quite a while ago, but we're definitely on a journey. We're into that journey. I think people are getting it now because a there's an official recognition that's happened.

Ian: 33:47

There are many other studies that have said this is bad for you. There's lots of counter studies as well. Like you get most um elements of study, there'll be a counter opinion um, so people are starting to get it. It's being driven from world health organization for us in the uk. There's also other studies from the Fire Brigades Union and University of Central Lancashire with Dr Anna Steck, producing bodies of evidence that are irrefutable that this is a problem. There's many others, you know. I mean there's, there's lots of. If you google it, you'll get so many results. So I think it is about education, for our people is understanding why this is happening, what we know now, what we didn't know then. So I think, in answer to your question, we are getting it. Are we getting it quickly enough and in enough depth?

Ian: 34:39

My opinion and it is my personal opinion is probably not. Can we do more? Could it be helped by government? Most definitely. That's a tricky nut to crack If you look at, for us and I think you mentioned earlier there asbestosis this is a new asbestosis for us, for sure. Yeah, we've dealt really well with that problem over the years and we've now got legislation and we've now got legislation and we've now got protective and we've got laws against all of that. We've got none of that. None to do with contaminants is not legislated in any way, shape or form. It's best practice. Best practice so you can follow it. You'd have a real difficult move in saying why you'd gone away from best practice, but a lot of I don't want to use the phrase being counters but we'll go. It's not legislated, therefore we don't need to do it.

Ian: 35:31

Not going to spend you do need to do it because actually some of us won't be on this planet and our colleagues won't, and we don't want that to happen by any way, shape or form law is coming.

Robbie: 35:41

I feel the law is on its way. I hope and I've been saying it for the last three years since I've been in this post but, um, something has to give. As, as ian has eloquently just put, mesothelioma is linked to asbestosis, as you know, um, and I don't know anybody with mesothelioma pretty much certainly not in my industry. Um, I know loads of people with prostate cancer, bladder cancer, myself included, various other lung nasties, uh, throat tongue because of what we do, because of the lack of control measure we've put in place over the last millennia, but the last decade certainly. Um, we now know, we've known. So america legislated for this in 1982. We now know that during 9-11, 343 firefighters died, more than double that have died from diseases attributed to 9-11. So it's absolutely a known quantity.

Simon: 36:27

We know that those risks exist in every building, every fire, every noxious air environment we go into I think, I think anybody that's paying attention, I think, instinctively understands that there is a a high risk to that sector. Like I think you know, you can't have not read the stories to see what's interesting is are we joining the dots? Because it's one thing being aware, like I think everybody's seen, because 9-11 was such a high profile event, particularly the aftermath and it worked, like john stewart's been doing fighting for the fire service and so on, and the the politicking and nonsense that goes on with it as well. Um, but from what you've been saying, like some countries are accepting that this is a risk and they're therefore legislating for it and protecting that like this is understood people.

Ian: 37:17

Yeah, they've joined the dot.

Simon: 37:18

This is not an eliminatable risk. Therefore, people are going to be hurt doing this job, injured through health impacts. Therefore, we need to protect them and provide support for them as a result. Are you saying that that isn't currently the state in the uk? I think we're at various.

Ian: 37:38

Yeah, we're at various points. If you use your analogy of joining the dots in a picture, we've joined some of those. Yeah, we've still got a lot more dots to join till at the moment. If you use that analogy of joining the dots in a picture, we've joined some of those. We've still got a lot more dots to join At the moment. If you use that analogy of the picture, we don't know what the picture is, but we can start to see what we think it is using your analogy. But I think some, depending on where we're going with that, we're going. Okay, we can join this a bit quicker now. We need to join this quicker.

Simon: 38:08

We can't just wait for it to catch up with us. Yeah, we need to be ahead of that curve. And look, we're not, we're. You can't eliminate the hero from the equation, right, which is and that's the second point to that picture you were painting around grenfell. I think it's understood intrinsically that there are events that happen where a fire officer going at fire, people are going to remain in harm's way to get a job done. Yeah, and they will. They will accept willingly the risks that come with that, because and that's- in there.

Simon: 38:37

That's what we're employed for, and that's the like, sim.

Robbie: 38:39

We will risk our lives a lot to save savable life. We will risk our lives to a moderate degree to save life that is possibly savable and we won't risk our lives a lot to save a savable life. We will risk our lives to a moderate degree to save life that is possibly savable and we won't risk our lives to save life that is lost. Yeah, or buildings, yeah. Unfortunately, that's kind of lost its way a little bit. We absolutely I know that every fire station that I go and I'm on a national roadshow now to try and bang the drum about this I will speak around a table of peers about the risks.

Robbie: 39:00

We all understand the risks. We will wear nitrile gloves to eliminate, as best we can, testicular cancer from the fact that we touch the equipment without washing our hands. Nobody washes their hands before they go for a pee. Therefore, that that cross contamination of nasties on your hands will go to you a bit um, in sort of layman's terms I suppose, yeah, um that's not a world a lot of people have to occupy having to wear gloves to go to the loo.

Simon: 39:22

I'll be frank, you know, you know. So that might be. You know what seems like norm to you. Most people are going to go if we touch something. Are you shitting me? That's a thing, not once to go to the loo.

Ian: 39:33

But what robbie's explained there is you know, if we touch stuff that's got particulate matter on it or we've inhaled it, invariably as blokes, um, we would. We would probably have touched it with, uh, not hands. We.

Robbie: 39:45

If we're wearing nitrile gloves before we go to the toilet, we can take them off, and now we can do that without the risk of passing any of that on and on from that on a fire ground when you're expected to be there for four hours, you will need I'm 54, nearly you know I need to use a little more often than most, so, exactly so you have no facilities generally on an on a dynamic fire ground to wash your hands because there is no running water. Yeah, we have water on the back of the truck. It's fairly minging and it's the last thing on your mind. Because of our risk aversion, or our lack of risk aversion, we are, you know, our appetite for risk is high, which is it, is what it is. I'm proud to say that I've been into lots of dodgy areas for the greater good, and it's's again a cliche, but I wouldn't wash my hands to go for a pee because it's just not what we do. Is it? Is it human nature? Is that you don't? You wash your hands after.

Robbie: 40:28

So, on a fire ground, your hands are minging, you will eat because you have to eat, because you're hungry, and before the last three or four years anyway, there wasn't a facility to wash hands because it just wasn't thought of. You know, hang on a minute, this is a 10 pump evolution. We get somebody from outside agencies, we'll get the Samaritans or we'll have a group of people feeding us feeding stations. There was no provision for washing at all before going to get food and the pictures are horrific. You know, people covered and I've been there covered in soot, head to toe in crap, building material, asbestos, probably all the other toxic nasties. We're in a queue for a burger.

Simon: 41:02

Well, you know that picture you paint and I know we had this conversation before. It's almost like you think of your firefighter calendars and all of this. It's almost the imagery, isn't it, of the sooty firefighter. Absolutely. Which is literally the manifestation of risk, isn't it? Like you know, the face painted with black soot 100%, you've hit the nail on the head.

Ian: 41:28

That badge of the honour't it? Like? You know, the the, the face painted with black. So, 100, you've hit the nail on the head that that, that badge of the honor. It was considered, you know, if you'd come off the fire ground. You were all those years ago and you work up. You've done a good job. Yeah, you've done that. Yeah, that that. That view and we were talking about education has changed. Now you should come off the fire ground looking as pristine as you went in, practically yeah um with the, you know, wiping your faces and having a wash, washing your hands.

Ian: 41:49

If you were to use robbie's analogy of clearing up for food, if you're at home in the old days, your mum or your daddy, your parent would say to you go wash your hands before you have tea.

Simon: 41:58

Yeah, same thing yeah so so what's the best way to put this? I think what's interesting here is that you've you've got such extreme exposure to risk in and around event an event. Is it your sense that your exposure to the second and tertiary risk that's just I don't know if you even have names for them, but let's say the, the, the day after risk where you're assessing and cleaning up and making safe and all the other stuff that that you guys do um and the long-term exposure of just being around five retardant material and all the other things will come on to? Is your sense that the risk for this long-term health part is firmly fixed in that emergency? Or is it everything? Is it everything combined at the beginning? It's at the most of the risk is in that in the beginning, eliminate, reduce isolate, contain.

Robbie: 42:57

So the way we see it, the way I, and I see it as a cancer patient, is that I could have done and I should have done things differently. I didn't know, and perhaps I wasn't educated and I was blasé. And the badge of honour thing we have fans, for instance. Most fire and rescue services in the UK have a force-driven air system where you can blow the smoke out. So you would create a vent profile. You would open a window in a first floor, say, put the fan on and it blows all that smoke that we now know to be really bad for you out a window. So that is.

Robbie: 43:24

It has a number of massive advantages that you can see the person that's laid on the floor now, because there's no smoke involved. They can breathe fresh air, because they're having a flow of lots of hundreds or thousands of litres of air a minute, but we don't. So we still have two breathing apparatus, one hose rule, left hand search of a building. We will, though, because it's, dare I say, it's fun, it is really good and that's all fun. I don't mean fun. The risk, the, the dump of adrenaline is better than no, I understand, I, I don't.

Simon: 43:49

You know, you don't need to to dress it up that there's a, there's a, there's an adrenaline rush to putting yourself in house. I get, I get that, you know. So you want to do the thing. It's a natural instinct. It's a natural instinct, especially if it's in your blood. It's what you do. Um, but like that, I would have thought that my instinct would be like blowing loads of air into a fire makes it worse.

Robbie: 44:13

It's controlled it's classically controlled, so it has to be with a certain set of criteria, got you? Um, not with sand. In that, though, we have better ways of fighting fires, so we don't need. Unless there's life risk in that building more often than not the building's lost, or you know that room is lost we fight the fire from outside, external attack on that fire without having to go into that toxic nasty, yeah, is the way forward. We often don't, sometimes we can't, and I get that, but in the main, we should absolutely do things slightly differently.

Robbie: 44:39

Um, the americans and I'm not going to slag them off, probably am um, they will go in because they're particularly stupid, I feel, and they're dangerously dangerous because they've taken this badge of honor to the nth degree and they lose hundreds of firefighters every year. We get it much better than that, but still a car fire. We will still have people at three in the morning because they can't be asked to wash the kit, not put a breathing apparatus on, and the governor at the job will allow that, because you're all friends and you're part of a team, and I get that part of the team too but we need somebody to say stop, put that kit on, go in there. The fan will control that flow of air, that flow of nasty particulate heavy gases, all those naphthalenes and all the benzenes and nasty shit coming from a car fire. Viton seals, fluorolastomas are on these cars.

Robbie: 45:24

We put a fan in the way that we're going to walk to the car. We put a fan in the way that we're going to walk to the car, so my glasses are there. Car's on fire. We're coming from the area where the wind is blowing that smoke away. We will never be in a fire, smoky environment again. In that car fire. The car's lost the skip, fire's gone. We don't know we will disappear in a car fire, in a plume of smoke every day, because we just don't think, because it's not that true.

Ian: 45:44

We're trying to change that culture piece and there are lots of innovative ways of which we can do that, and Robbie's described one as a fan that we can use for everything. Take that to the after the fire and Robbie's described their core temperature and how that affects us. Put the fan on, cool us down. That starts to mitigate some of those. So there's a mitigation factor. Some of our fire engines we'll build them differently and we won't. Hopefully, it's just a big red toolbox with loads of tools in it, so we need to use the most appropriate tool. We won't use the spanner to hit a nail, we'll use the hammer to hit a nail, which is kind of an irony, really, considering.

Simon: 46:25

I'm going to pigeonhole you and characterise the fire service in in one big bunch here, which is, of course, the sensible thing to do. Um, but I imagine you're, generally speaking, a big bunch of blokes with a massive toolkit. Like most blokes, you want to use every tool available to you at all times. It seems an anathema to me that you're not getting every tool. Imagine every chance you get. I think you're gettingema to me that you're not getting every tool. Imagine every chance you get. I think you're getting every toy out that you could possibly.

Ian: 46:50

I think there's a bit of both, because, yeah, you get that and uh, yeah, I mean, as as a fire service, a we're not just blokes.

Simon: 46:58

So there's a whole gamut.

Ian: 46:59

I do, yeah, and I do so for that, that that can work both ways. Lots of people, yeah, I want to get every tool in the box out, but then there's the inherent laziness that actually I want to use one tool because I don't need to go another 20 yards and get another one. That's probably more efficient. Actually, if you want to open the door, the crowbar would be the best tool, but I've got a dirty great big screwdriver here that does it, because I know it's worked. So I think there's a bit of both of those worlds that you describe, you take out.

Simon: 47:24

You also have to clean up and put back. In theory, yeah, there's the rub.

Ian: 47:28

Yeah, right In theory, if you've made it dirty, go clean it because it's got some nasty stuff on it. Yeah, but you can't see it. But you can't necessarily see it.

Simon: 47:39

So a big part of this risk, if I get you right, is a cumulative exposure to very high-risk events. It can be both exposure to very high risk events, so it can be both but interlaced with chronic exposure to being around the residue of those high risk events for long periods of time, both, I think so. In this first category we've got the actual emergency event the car fire, the house fire, all of these things where there's massive amounts of really bad stuff everywhere and just by the nature of being around it, even in the event itself or in the perimeter of it, you're going to be exposed. The water's drenched with it, everything is covered in it, your clothes are being superheated, it like it's just.

Simon: 48:25

I think most people can picture the toxicity of that environment. But then, post-fact, you're also in and around events where this stuff is still off-gassing massively. When you get back to the fire station, all your stuff that's been superheated is probably off-gassing for periods of time. You've got equipment that's been, everything has been coated in water and stuff that's threatened in. This stuff, yeah, yeah, like it's. It must be a an incredibly toxic environment, just generally in and around, from a timing perspective, in and around it, not just the geological, geographically. Yeah, in that 24 hour, 36 hour period in and around that event, everything that was near that place is just covered in stuff. Yeah, and you imagine, if you're putting benzene meters and, like you say, all that stuff near it, it would just be off the rick, it would go yeah, it would go off all the time.

Ian: 49:18

And you mentioned earlier about um. You know the period afterwards. You've got that great big rise of when you're doing all the explosive activity and then you've got a slow decline. But whilst you're in the slow decline there's still risk within that decline until it gets to an acceptable level. Oh yeah, where that acceptable level is.

Ian: 49:35

So, from the fire service, everyone's asking how dirty is dirty? How clean is clean? Zero is the answer, is, is is the utopia. How do you get to that and where do those sit? We know we've got exposure limits to certain chemicals. We've got EH40 that determines what those levels are. Some of our meters are set to that.

Ian: 49:57

But within that you've mentioned other things like that VOCs gassing off. How are we measuring them? We're not seeing them, we're not smelling them, but we know they're there. We've now started to use air quality monitors that are actually we're putting them in places. Both of our services are doing this. They're actually measuring some of those to give us the data to say you might not think it's happening, but here's the irrefutable data that tells you how we deal with that.

Ian: 50:24

We've got to make a plan for maybe and you mentioned a period of when we go back and how we deal with that. We've got to make a plan for Maybe and you mentioned a period of when we go back and how we deal with it over the next 24 hours. I suggest it's way before that. Immediately. We've got to deal with it at the fire ground, clean it properly. We've got to come back in what would be a cleaner cab where we've not got breathing apparatus sets that could be dirty, gassing off. We've started, as fire services, to work towards that. We then get back to station before we even walk through the door. We need to do some stuff so that we don't take that into the building while I have you I just want to briefly talk to you about ultra protect, a partner of this podcast.

Simon: 51:01

They're not here by accident. Like the podcast, they are passionate about driving changes in our indoor environment and are an all-round great company to deal with. They have years of experience in the industry and a team of people I have leaned on on many an occasion for advice and insight. From continuously tracking air quality to specific sampling, they analyze and provide actionable insights for the built environment. Specializing in dust management, they provide amazing products and services that minimize risk and improve environments, from construction sites to offices, to manufacturing settings, through to solutions around ventilation aimed at improving the environment in the long term.

Simon: 51:50

It's a company well worth checking out. There are links in the show notes and on air quality matters sites and, of course, at ultra protect uk. Now back to the podcast. Currently, I mean, I know, I mean we had this conversation before this podcast where you know, for example, you were saying modern engines, for example, you'll actually store your fire gear out of the cab, whereas in the old days all of that stuff would have just been hung up in the cab, saturating everything in the cab and poor materials.

Ian: 52:19

So, yeah, yes, yeah if you look at some of our older fire engines or fire appliances, they will have cloth seats like you would have traditionally had, which is a sponge. It's literally sucking it in. Well, you can instantly eliminate some of that by putting a wipeable service in that is more plasticized in some way to go. You know what? I can wipe that now?

Robbie: 52:37

I couldn't wipe it before yeah, one of the things we suffer with is funding, and I'm always going to bang the drum. We don't have enough money to facilitate this, so I'm going to use cornwall as a case in point. I was in cornwall fire rescue service only last month. They are very poor, it's fair to say, and they are a brave bunch of heroes, if you want, because they have crap. Um, they need more government investment to pick themselves up. I work in hampshire, in the isle of wight fire rescue. We're running a bit of a deficit, but in the main we're a wealthy many taxpayers, many council taxpayers, so we're quite well funded. We can afford ba breathing apparatus sets out of our cab to put them in our rear locker, and we are now building 48 new appliances to deliver that. Most I'm going to say most fire and rescue services just cannot do that, so they will live with that risk for another 10 or 15 years. This is a known risk that needs to change and that's what I find unacceptable.

Simon: 53:26

Right, I think everybody accepts you'll get heroes hanging around a Grenfell until the job is done right. While people are at risk, they'll do what they need to. There's a risk about being. There's even a risk about levels of risk in and around a fire where you understand, you may even accept and tolerate the fact that you're exposing yourself to stuff because you're just in and around a dangerous environment. That's what you do.

Simon: 53:54

But I think the risk is that once that emergency finishes, even though the risk level may be a tenth of what it was beforehand it could still be 500 of what it was beforehand. It could still be 500 fold what is acceptable easily and it's still an emergency from a risk perspective, from a healthy state, because it's so far down from the event that this thing about you know, in and around the cab and all the fire retardant materials and stuff like that toxic environment, is a serious, fundamental risk that, just because it's not part of the original event, is tolerated unacceptably. So so like if you, if we, if we fundamentally know that there's an inherent risk about being around the, the fire, the protective equipment you have to wear in a fire that has been under unbelievable temperatures. That, I'm assuming, is absolutely soaked in fire retardant. Right like, absolutely like soaked in fire retardant, which we know is an endocrine disruptor, you know, cancer, class one, carcinogen, forever chemical, like you name it.

Ian: 55:04

It's as bad as it gets and we've built them into our fire kit, right, yeah, so the science is now trying to take them back out of it, sure, but still give us the protection.

Simon: 55:14

But understandably so. But knowing that risk is then in the cab post fact that you're sat there then in without your mask and breathing apparatus breathing, breathing that in is mental From an outside looking in at that, that's an intolerable risk from a societal perspective why you would expose people that are there accepting risks on your behalf.

Ian: 55:46

that after that risk is finished, finished, you're still putting them in harm's way, yeah, it just to me just seems an anathema it's a really good observation because if we're getting other professionals looking at us and thinking that now and the general public is, they might not have had that thought process before. But but now we're trying to raise this. People are outside going. Why is nothing being done about this? We're trying, we're banging the drum, as many are, and the industry, our industry, the fire industry, are taking that on board.

Ian: 56:18

Fire engines are being built differently. We're trying to use different materials. We're trying to zone our buildings. We're trying to educate ourselves and we can educate the people who buildings. We're trying to educate ourselves so that and we can educate the people who feed into our industry to go. Please help us with this. Yeah, and I'll be honest, there are a lot of, uh, fire professionals that are doing that, that are really helping us, um, to move that forward. Are we moving forward at the pace we need for? For the risk we've got at the moment? I I don't think I'm, I don't think I can answer that proficiently.

Simon: 56:49

And some stuff there's no excuse for, like you know, if it's administrative.

Simon: 56:53

I mean we had this conversation, or maybe Rob was telling me, about the fact that you like, for example, when you bring a fire truck back to the station, the instinct is to shut the garage doors when you bring it back in and actually just leaving stuff open for a period of time to let that air and the off gas and gas off and reduce that risk. That's an administrative control that can be changed without cost to anybody necessarily, so that can be an eat, that there are easy remedies here, yeah, but there are also fundamental risks that you're being exposed to. That that isn administrative. That it's a fundamental exposure to risk that we know is causing serious harm to people that are already putting themselves in harm's way by the nature of the job. When we look at tolerance of risk, that's up there on the scale of intolerable, unacceptable, yeah, and it's purely funding. It is that you know, and I imagine that we've just picked on one, but I imagine yeah, and look at that risk matrix, it'll be right up there, absolutely, absolutely top of the pyramid.

Simon: 57:58

And this is what I think we always forget with risk, particularly air quality risk, is that an event will cause a reaction and, as we said, over a short period of time, some very strict protocols to, and you'll never eliminate all of it. But just because it's a fraction of what it was at its peak doesn't mean it's still not a massively intolerable risk. Yeah, you know that that equipment and clothing and truck and everything that you've been in and around couldn't you know? I don't know because I haven't seen the science on it, but I could imagine it being potentially at an intolerable level for days I've got, essentially so in 2018, I mean my service are making massive inroads.

Robbie: 58:39

They really are. We spend a lot of money and we are making as much as we can with what we've got. It's fair to say that they have invested lots of time, as I have, I mean. I mean I've come here today on a as we mentioned earlier, I've got a car, a ferry, a train, a tube train, at my own cost to come here to try. It shouldn't be, you know, it shouldn't be down to people like me to push this as a cancer patient. It should be somebody listening from somewhere else. But going back, I've lost my train of thought.

Simon: 59:03

It was 2018.

Robbie: 59:04

Sorry 2018. Sorry 2018. So we swabbed somebody for a dissertation in a fire and rescue service, swabbed a fire station on the south coast and when they took the swabs in 2018, those swabs were tested at the University of Central Lancashire as part of a dissertation. Had they been a ship that sailed in UK waters, those swabs would have impounded that ship. Alongside that was a fire station, green area, a walk-through area where the cleaner cleans, where the admin lady admins, where the firefighters walk, where the firefighters children come and see them during the day if they're on a longer shift. A fully exposed area, and it would have been at the levels that a uk ship would have been built alongside it. And that is every fire station across the UK today. Nothing's changed.

Simon: 59:49

Nothing has changed because are people being exposed to risks that aren't on the front line? Are there people getting ill in the fire service? It's really that are not actually even at the job at the job so it's a really interesting question.

Ian: 1:00:06

I agree but most likely so if you look at that um contamination piece as it rolls down and our colleague john lord gives a really good presentation on this that actually there's the big bang effect. The firefighter is there but the police officer is doing the cordon, the paramedic that comes in and does that and then cuts the clothes off. Where do the clothes go? They then tell them in the ambulance they haven't decommomm the casualty at that point. They're now at the hospital. There's now people gassing off dealing with that. They're now dealing with that cpr. There's the. There's mrs miggins who's helped the person come in before they got there. Now they're going to the the in the next few hours oh, I was at this. Someone comes around, gives them a cup of tea.

Ian: 1:00:45

That contamination chain goes on and on and on and on. Okay, it gets less and less as you go on, but some of those contamination pieces are quite high because it's unseen. You know, if someone has a bonfire in your next door, years ago it would have been acceptable. Everyone on a Sunday afternoon had a bonfire. Because they're just burning the rubbish in the garden. It's not acceptable anymore and I can't even remember if it's legislated anymore. But actually, if you've got your washing out next door, it's not clean washing anymore, is it? Your whites aren't white, so there's a symbol of where it's going and we tell people. When there's big fires, the general public close your doors and windows. Yeah, so we've recognised.

Simon: 1:01:26

If you can smell it, something's there because, yeah, smell is either a voc or something else a resident being exposed once in their lifetime to a house fire smoke, even though there's a peak in risk? Yeah, it is likely to have an, and likewise a nurse that, maybe once every six months, is being exposed to smothguff. Absolutely that. Workplace exposure. It's frequency and severity calculation here.

Ian: 1:01:52

But for us that frequency just carries on, that's the difference. We don't know when the next bit is. We don't know how big it will be or small, but we do know. If we go to a fire appliance and put our white gloves on and go like that, it'll come off black. Well, what is?

Robbie: 1:02:07

that. So we're now zoning red, amber, green. So red is naughty, amber is less so and green obviously is tolerable. That we know of. At the moment, given that we don't have legislation to do this, we are taking the pragmatic approach to try and change because we know it's the right thing to do.

Robbie: 1:02:23

People on Samoa we've got 61 fire stations in Amsterdam. We People on Samoa we've got 61 fire stations in Amsterdam and the Isle of Wight. We just don't have the money. We've not had the investments since the 1950s when they were built post-war. Pretty much they're dilapidated. In a lot of cases we can't offer a shower. In some cases, scotland Fire and Rescue they have 11 fire stations with no running water. So these individuals that come back from that event whether that's a wildfire or a bin fire or whatever, some noxious, horrible gas exposure, um can't even shower, so they'll take that home.

Robbie: 1:02:51

We now know that tumor markers are being shared. So we now know that our tumors are being taken home, like they were with the asbestos days. Yeah, we lie next to our partner and our partner is mirroring that disease, the actual disease. So we have our own unique set of diseases. Unfortunately, in terms of cancer, we are now taking those home.

Robbie: 1:03:09

We now know that this exposure to this air, this toxic, nasty rubbish, is making us mentally ill, not because of the stress of it, because it's physically changing our dna profile, our dna. It's also affecting our fertility. So in canada at the moment, people are, when they're joining the fire and rescue service, are being told to deposit sperm because we know that the exposure to these horrible toxins are. So my dad died of prostate cancer. I unfortunately have prostate cancer now. It seems it is what it is and I'm on a two-week wait to be checked If I had no family history of cancer. We as firefighters are creating that first level of disease and we are sharing that with our children. So if there was no dna floor in my, this chemical, nasty exposure is changing our dna that we are sharing with our children yeah, you're creating a route for a disease chain that never was potentially there so that's the level of this so firefighters in canada are being advised to deposit sperm at the start of their career.

Robbie: 1:04:08

Exactly, exactly yeah it's unbelievable, isn't it?

Simon: 1:04:12

that's like when, you know, we talk about scales of risk and stuff often and, like I said at the very beginning of this podcast, often the conversation and this looks so interesting about this conversation is it it it take? I think there's always lessons to learn from the extreme and there's stuff we can distill, for people can distill from this conversation and apply in lesser risky environments. I think that's what's fascinating. But I had no idea quite. I mean, we've had conversations about, you know, the level of cancer and risk and so on, but when fire service organizations are actively advising people at the start of their career to do things like that incredible isn't?

Ian: 1:04:55

it kind of draws a line in the sand it's saying like yeah, that's bonkers and there's also you know, most of uh, we said before most of the other countries america and new zealand, australia stuff like that. Presumptive legislation sits within the firefighting as a career. So if you get some of these, the diseases that we've discussed before, there's an automatic realization that that could, that could be occupational, because we know that world health organization has told us that. So presumptive legislation legally is actually we're going to do. We recognize that. Okay, how that works out financially with a governmental or how that goes in other countries. That's happened. It's taken a long time for that to happen. In this country, no presumptive legislation at all that links any of that to actually you've come out of the end of it and this has been the result of that because of what's happening.

Ian: 1:05:48

Yeah, this is where we want to try and get you know bigger, bigger levels than than we are on board with this. Are we getting there? We're surely banging the drum a lot louder and people are listening. Yeah, um, and some of our colleagues are taught you know, lobbying, parliament, stuff like that. We all know how difficult stuff like that is. Yeah, if you go back to your the asbestos piece, how much time and effort and and banging on the drum. Did that take to get to where it is now?

Simon: 1:06:16

we're exactly the same, but we need to bang as hard as we can with those messages we had a conversation recently with a lady called Plum Stone in Australia who talks about long-term illness and air quality being an accessibility right. So there are people that are vulnerable to infection because of cancer treatment, people that have autoimmune diseases, people with long COVID. There's a whole section of society that can't act, have difficulty accessing buildings that everybody else takes for granted because of the risk of infection. So classrooms and offices and all sorts of spaces. But fundamentally behind it, what makes it such a powerful argument is it's a. It's a fundamental fairness question that it's unfair to expect a child to be the only child masking in a classroom because they're trying to protect their father from getting ill because he's under cancer treatment. You know it's. It's a fairness thing.

Simon: 1:07:20

It's a very powerful argument and it seems to me this is a fairness piece, that that there's a, there's an understood risk, an inherent risk of being a fire officer, where you're you're going to expose yourself to risk by the nature of the job bit like joining the, the military right that there's an understood, an inherent, understood risk in the occupation, yeah, and you mitigate that risk as best you can, but there's an understood contract there that that's, that's what you're signing up for the unspoken. The unspoken risk, yeah, but what we're talking about here is an unfairness. Yeah, that for people that are putting themselves in harm's way and when I say people, I'm not talking about for you. You have put yourself in harm's way. It's inherently unfair for you to be exposed to further risk unnecessarily and we're rich countries. There's no excuse for protecting people.

Simon: 1:08:22

It's the same argument of providing adequate care for veterans. The same argument of providing adequate care for veterans. You know that you expect people to protect your country and you don't provide the services and security they need to protect them when they put their life on the line. This is no different. You've nailed it, absolutely no different to me that there are these known risks that are from the cursory. Look that from some of the material that you sent me about the research. It's pretty overwhelming. We're talking about degrees of unacceptability, we're not whether it's unacceptable or not. This is just plainly a risky. It's just an unfairness thing.

Robbie: 1:09:02

So the World Health Organization, nice guidelines, nhs guidelines around prostate cancer, for instance, we now know that we are 3.8, something like four times more likely to get prostate cancer diagnosis. Ata, younger age, akin to the black genetic minority group around the age of 40 to 50. We absolutely know that it's statistically. We are bombarded with the evidence. We cannot get our. My organization, then, and most others won't go outside of niceICE or NHS guidelines and I understand that. I understand that the litigation that may come from going outside, but they don't have the updated current evidence that is coming fairly quickly.

Robbie: 1:09:36

It's fair to say we know that firefighters are getting prostate cancer at a much younger age, at a much more aggressive stage, therefore much less treatable, and we're prevented. We're not preventing. We can prevent that. We can go for a better screening program. We don't have any screening. We have a three yearly medical. No bloods involved, no blood work.

Robbie: 1:09:52

Bearing in mind, the level of risk is huge level of exposure, inhalation and all that rubbish. We have no real tangible medical protection going forward. So every three years you might get a medical and you'll blow into a thing. Yeah, your, your lungs are okay. Yeah, you look all right. But we're fit people generally. So we mask all of the symptoms until it's too late. What we need is for people to adopt the NHS in particular. We can't have a prostate check until we're 50. The NHS won't allow us, but we know. The science is that we're 40 onwards we are suffering at a disproportionate rate. But to tell a GP that they're going well, I can't and my service are the same. Well, I can't go outside of our parameters. Well, you need to.

Simon: 1:10:34

I would have just automatically assumed and I know it's not going to be the case, but you should automatically assume that you'd be getting three monthly blood workups just to check the blood levels to make sure that you haven't got levels of x, y or z building up.

Ian: 1:10:51

We would love that do you know what I mean?

Simon: 1:10:52

like you would have thought that that would have been a just a given that, like you, were around literally around the nastiest chemicals known to man, by the nature of the work that you do. Yeah, you'd have thought that part of that would have been hair samples, blood works every three months to make sure. Hang on a minute. This station we're seeing a peak of exposure to X, y or Z. What's the mitigation we need to put in place for that? Are there changes in behaviour or habit? Are we picking up something?

Ian: 1:11:22

We'd love that to be the case and you've just explained a wonderful scenario. So we've explained about firefighters and what they normally do. Within our own profession we have probably people who are ultra exposed. So when we go and do training, we have breathing apparatus instructors that just literally work in that environment all the time. We have fire investigation officers that literally are in that all the time. So some some of that is yes, we will put enhanced medical intervention, not intervention. Some of our three yearly medicals we'll drop that down to a year or to six months because they are more exposed than others, but it doesn't go that much further than what you're saying bloods and hairs and all of that which actually give us the results we want. We won't be doing much more than that. Some services might be entering into psa tests for prostate cancer and others, but again, all of that generally. We've talked about funding. That costs money in some way, shape or form and you have to. You know it's a difficult decision.

Robbie: 1:12:27

we did a study with the University of Central Lancashire. Hampshire and the Isle of Wight were part of that study and Surrey were. We did some blood work for Anastek, professor Anastek just to look at this to get a level of the risk. 1,180 people did the blood tests. Hampshire did 114 of those. I think we're yet to find out the results of those tests, but early indications. Early indications, then, are that 7% of those people tested were asymptomatically diagnosed. 7% of our walking firefighters on fire stations have a disease Oblivious because we we maintain a level of fitness, as I've already alluded to. Yeah, yeah, these people are. If you get a bad back, bad shoulder, it's probably in your mind because it's a terrible place we're at at the moment. Yeah, we need better.

Simon: 1:13:13

Do you know what good looks like? Is there an equivalence in an industry that?

Ian: 1:13:19

does this well? Well, we might have a different opinion. For me, as an opinion, I don't think I'm expert enough to answer that question and the experts in most cases will give will give you yes, I think this is good. We we've said that before what is good. We know what better looks like. I don't think we've ended up at a. If we're in a good utopia place, you could use countries like sweden, for example, that have really health monitoring, they do psa tests, they have clean systems in place, the fire engine comes in, all their kit goes through a laundry, total new kit, all zoning. There's a bit of utah it's taken them so much time to get that and there's there's models. I think it's a skeletal left, yeah, skeletal model that they use and if you google that, you find. But all of that is a massive investment primarily driven through government and then down it's always the bloody Nordics. Have you noticed?

Ian: 1:14:11

this they're just so good. The clean air is. I was in Stockholm a little while ago and everywhere just feels. Their actual thinking around all of that is just so different from us their acceptance of it is. I'm not going to accept that.

Simon: 1:14:30

Do you know if there's different results in Sweden from a health outcome?

Robbie: 1:14:34

perspective. There absolutely are. So Swedish firefighters are much healthier and known to be much healthier. Their rates are much less.

Robbie: 1:14:40

Conversely, in America at the moment the breast cancer in females or those with breasts is seven times more likely. So, firefighters we don't have that evidence in uk but it's going to be very similar. Our firefighters and we are rightly trying to include it used to be nine percent females or those with breasts then identifies females in the fire service. We're trying to get that to about 14 and we're getting there slowly. We don't have the evidence and we're not. We're not alerting these people to the risk. We know it's going to be seven times more likely. Because America have already provided that evidence, we won't use theirs because, well, say American, it's very similar same products of combustion, same gases, same benzene, same napalene, same inhalation, exhaustion, all that stuff. So we're still employing actively these people are coming in, oblivious to the risk.

Robbie: 1:15:23

We're not initially telling them that you need to be better, you need to be more able to get a GP's appointment for scanning, you need to take lumps more seriously than you ever did. If you wish to stay in the role you need to breastfeeding. It transfers through to that, oh for sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Gallbladder is the thing that prevents that crossover generally. But conversely and perversely, the gallbladder is affected by the products of combustion. So if you're a female with a gallbladder and you're firefighting, your gallbladder will be disproportionately affected from the gases that's trying to clean your breast milk. Again, the policies for breastfeeding aren't across the piece. They should. If you're an operational female firefighter or somebody that can breastfeed in the fire service, a 12-month period is where you should be without breastfeeding. Nobody knows this. You know we're not, so we're passing it through our breast milk to our children.

Simon: 1:16:14

How does, how does a fire officer from Hampshire and the Isle of Wight know so much about gallbladders and breastfeeding and risk? How have you two found yourself here talking about this with such knowledge and insight? That's not by accident.

Ian: 1:16:36

Robbie has his own particular story with regards to his health path from the fire service, I think something along the way, having been a career firefighter and then up through an officer retiring out and coming back into the health and safety for the same fire and rescue service I once worked for. I want to see a change within where we've been. I know some of those activities that we've done. I've been there on Commons years ago where I've just got a neckerchief across my face protecting me from coming home and having black snot for days smelling for that. That should be a different world. For where we are now, I think for me it's ignited a bit, a reignited forgive the pun, um of that passion to go do you know what? And speaking to others, you know, robbie, and us, we and others, we work quite closely, we, we just want to make that better. So I think I think that's it for me is knowing where I was. That shouldn't be somebody else's future. Where I've been. Because the world has evolved, should evolve, needs to evolve into a different piece, and you mentioned about or is it Robbie mentioned about letting people know you will see all the wonderful adverts to be a firefighter. Come and be a firefighter, do the best for for your uh, you know where you are and you can have it for your community and all that. That's brilliant.

Ian: 1:18:02

Somewhere down the line, we need to tell you a bit like the military do. This is a disclaimer here, by the way. Yeah, and I give a talk, as probably Robbie does to all our neurograds, a contamination talk, and it's literally this is me, this is where I've got, this is where I need you. Would you be sat in this room if you knew all of this? Were you aware of this when we recruited you? Some may have been, some may not. That education piece for me is the key. We can now get some peer pressure going at the newer recruits coming in who will do it differently from the old farts like us that did it like we did. We didn't know that then and we have.

Simon: 1:18:43

You have an obligation to people. This is their, this is their life, their health and well-being not just them, but their wives and partners and one of them and generations to come. They have those conversations. We have an obligation for them to know, and that's fine. People may understand that and be prepared to accept that risk. They always will. That's the nature of people that want to put themselves in harm's way to protect people.

Ian: 1:19:10

You won't take that away from people, but we have an obligation that people come into that knowing, understanding the risks, and it's funny when you have those conversations conversations you can see the light bulb moments. Yeah, you can actually see people go and thought of that. So he or she is right. You can observe some of those behaviors. I know when I give the recruits. When we got through all these conversations and robbie's described they're about wearing gloves or double gloving, because that's even better, because you can throw the top one away and still keep the bottom one underneath. You then go back and observe that behaviour. From day one to day three or four. It has changed instantly. So that day four behaviour now, if they're a career firefighter, that's going to be the norm for them.

Simon: 1:19:58

One thing that I think plays in favour of the fire service is it's a hierarchical environment and always will be, and we see this in construction. It seems like habit and culture are so ingrained and embedded in structures, but we see it time and time again. If there's a real reason for change, organisations change on a dime. We know it, you all know, know it. A piece of equipment has come along, or a bit of awareness on how to deal with a fire that wasn't there before. You can see an entire industry change in a matter of months. So, even though organizations can be quite traditional, they can have long-standing cultures and habit, particularly hierarchical ones.

Simon: 1:20:38

Your, your entire raison d'etre is to figure out how to get around problems. Your problem solvers, ultimately right in the most extreme environments, which means it's in your day of dna. Like you're presenting with a challenge, you'll figure out how to fix it. So if it's, if this is understood and it's resourced to deal with, it can be, and there are examples, like you say, of Sweden, that may not be getting everything right, but we know, by doing certain things and properly resourced, you can have a real impact on people's long-term health and wellbeing. Yeah, like it's not an unknown. That's the amazing thing here. We now know more.

Robbie: 1:21:19

It's morally right now. I mean, I find myself going back to how I know things about gallbladders. Yeah, so I joined the fire service aged 34 after a 15-year former military career. For six years I was fairly fit and well and then, aged just aged 40, I went for a P and it was probably being uncoloured. It turned out that that was was and I won't go into too much of the history, but fairly dramatic period of my life with a young family seven and five, two children, three children one was 17, seven and five, but the significant impact was the younger ones. I was diagnosed with an aggressive bladder cancer aged 40 and 19 sessions of chemotherapy, 30 invasive surgeries at least with more to come, it seems and a recent probable diagnosis of prostate cancer only in the last pair of weeks. Um is such that it is giving me a quite a drive to to make a difference, because I am the end result of not doing it right. Um, I'm pragmatic and I won't make old bones.

Robbie: 1:22:13

This will probably take my life and you know it's shit, um, and every day it's shit, but it's dark and miserable. But it is the real life. You know this is I'm not unique. Unfortunately there are so many of us that are going to be ill because, you mentioned earlier, things change on a dime. If it's investment, if it's a public sector and you are, dare I say, a blue collar worker in the public sector it doesn't change that well. It doesn't change very quickly, not quick enough in any way, shape or form.

Robbie: 1:22:40

So we have things called a SNOMED code, which is a medical terminology for a set of numbers, essentially. So firefighting we know firefighting is an exposure, an exposure to high levels of toxins. This has been in existence for 15 years. It took me right into my GP as a former veteran to say, you know, because there's things about mental health and serving in iraq and stuff. Um, they know they have a snowmed code. So I wrote to my gp and said, is there anything for fire service? And they said, yeah, yeah, we've got these. So they've had them for 10 or 15 years. We just didn't share it because it means the word cancer, so an illness, and fire services don't want to admit any of that. Unfortunately, because they're not legislated for.

Robbie: 1:23:20

I get it. Um, until they do. We're in this hiatus period, so the snow med code should be given to everybody and it is a number of digits that goes next to your name to let your doctor know that actually you are in an environment, in a, in a workplace that is at a greater risk. Some fire rescue services won't share that with their individuals. This is how base it is. We We've got the codes, I found them and I'm really chuffed that I found those SNOMED codes and they've gone nationally. In fact they've gone to New Zealand. So we now have them everywhere.

Robbie: 1:23:50

Most fire and rescue services in the UK have adopted it. So I'll pat myself on the back for that one, to be fair. But it took me right into my GP. It wasn't my health team, it wasn't the national drive to find these figures. Snomed is if you've got MS and you present on a good day, your GP or a GP that hasn't seen you before wouldn't recognise symptomatic. So the SNOMED code is next to your name saying Mr Smith has got MS. So any of those symptoms from today might be linked to his MS. Do you see what?

Simon: 1:24:21

Yeah, it's that kind of red. It's a red flag to say this person because of the nature of what they did. If presenting with these range of systems, it could be just benign something you might need to take the diagnosis in a different direction.

Ian: 1:24:33

Yeah, or it might. Yeah, it probably, unfortunately, where we are, probably we won't speed things up. It may do, hopefully it would, but it might get those medical professionals thinking differently ago. Okay, there's there, that might be a different route we need to take because of these two numerical codes against you, had they been against my name?

Robbie: 1:24:51

when I was 40 um, initially I was doing lots of marathon running. I just had a knee surgery, so that obviously lead down that route. Anyway, um, I presented to my gp with blood in my urine hematuria even um and initially was given antibiotics for about 18 months because I was young and I was fit. Yeah, if they'd seen I was a firefighter, they may have got me early intervention and a cystoscopy and and they you know, but they've known you were a firefighter when they were first.

Simon: 1:25:17

Unless you brought it up exactly, you're just turning up as a. We talk about this a lot with their quality. Actually, in these kind of chronic conditions, like most people when they go to your doctor, you've got a long list of stuff that you want to get through and often you wait, like most people, you wait until it's serious enough because you have to pay and it's. You know you get a limited amount of time with the gp seven minutes, yeah, um, so you don't. You don't get time to outlay all of the context to a gp where a gp is going to go hang on a minute. Tell me why this isn't a good reason for this. Yeah, you know we talk about this with mold diagnoses and other chronic I haven't got time to understand.

Simon: 1:25:55

I haven't got time to process it and you probably may not even get down to those minor ailments that, in combination with what you're presenting with, link to the might link to a bigger picture.

Robbie: 1:26:05

So this is fundamental not knowing what your occupation is and that is for everybody listening to this if you're working in an air quality, in an area that concerns you with air quality, there is likely to be a snow med code attributed to your employ, to you, what you do for a living. So if you're a builder, if you're a plasterer, if you're a I don't know a brain surgeon, we now know that people that work diathermy in hospitals, they now have a SNOMED code associated with people removing the tumour and do you know, is it.

Robbie: 1:26:31

S-N-O-W.

Ian: 1:26:45

No, no, w S what's this that you know? A systemized non-created? I could google it if you wish. No, I'll find and put it in the show notes we'll put. We'll create some links for some of us carry cards or whatever. That just. It's not to say I want to be treated in any special. It's actually yeah, and we've, we've, I've, we've been to events where actually I don't know anything about that. What are you talking about? Still, you can go to your doctors for normal ailments and I had a breathing issue at some point and I went. You do know there's some SNOMED codes on my records, do you? And the doctor went. I don't know what you're talking about. I went can you just check your records? I've previously told them and I went.

Simon: 1:27:13

Oh yes, so will GPs not know what a SNOMED code is. As well they may.

Robbie: 1:27:22

So the NHS are obliged to use snow mid throughout the uk. It's an, it's an. It's a global system. But the uk nhs absolutely should have this system. Okay, um, wales devolved governments are struggling a little bit to catch up, but absolutely your gp should. It's a software issue and it's a funding issue with your gp surgery. If they haven't got snow mid and they're not using snow mid, they should and it's legislated for. So that is a patient liaison um, um challenge. Why haven't you? You are legislated to and you're not. So you're fundamentally failing me as as an nhs, gp surgery etc and, you know, does this snowmed code actually impact?

Simon: 1:27:52

so, even even if bloods are coming back, if there's a snowmed code against your patient number, yeah, they might view the results differently it may well down.

Ian: 1:28:02

We can't say, we're not medical professionals but yeah, from what we've understand from that, actually it may well trigger a different pathway.

Robbie: 1:28:09

Not antibiotics and yeah or yeah, for me case in point. You know the fact that I've had dozens of recurrence of this bladder cancer that I was diagnosed with. That may be a secondary or hopefully is a secondary, another primary for the prostate. But had I had this done initially and snowmode was against my name, they would absolutely have seen me earlier cystoscopy within 18 months, not waiting for 18 months and it's about banging the drum and saying I need to be seen, but if I'd have been caught early I wouldn't have had as many recurrence. So therefore, the cost to the taxpayer my surgeries have cost something like 350 000 pounds of taxpayers money. If I'd have presented with a snowman code initially, it would have cost probably 50k. So I would have saved the uk plc 300k by being seen earlier, diagnosed earlier, treated more robustly quickly, uh, initially. It would have saved money in the long run. So it's absolutely beneficial.

Simon: 1:29:02

And you're quite an interesting personal story in the sense that you were both in the military and served in Iraq and also the Binafair officer. I just have to correct you there I haven't served in the military. Yeah, good point.

Simon: 1:29:19

Felicitas have talked about Raleigh, because some people won't see this on video as well, so I always have to remember that yeah um, do you see equivalence, like it must be, because it's both, both professions have put you in harm's way, where there's an understood, uh, unspoken risk. We know from iraq that there's been exposure, particularly with, like the fire, burning pits and things like. There's some it was some exposure to things in iraq that were risky, um, snowmed codes, I imagine, also associated with this. There's some equivalence there for you in those two careers, isn't there? In the sense of exposure, unspoken risk, spoken about risk, yeah, long-term health impacts, um, you, you, you went into both of those careers understanding that both of those careers could kill you. It's, it must be a bitter pill to swallow that it's something else that's getting you. Absolutely not the, the, the unspoken risk, yeah yeah, explosive risk is is as we've explored.

Robbie: 1:30:24

It's exciting and all those things that you know we do with testosterone. Um, I shouldn't be dying because of what I've done post incident. I shouldn't be dying because there is no relief strategy to get somebody to come and relieve me, because we've not recruited enough throughout the service. For instance yeah, without getting too political, I shouldn't be done because there isn't any contractual funding to clean the buildings we work in. So our people that are working as green book members of staff, so non-operational members of staff, are working in our sites. We don't have air quality monitoring at all across our sites at the moment, so our air is probably poor.

Robbie: 1:30:56

We have a burns unit on our footprint that sits, and same for surrey and same for lots of other farm rescue services that burn carbonation material three times a week. Massive pollutants. We need to train, absolutely. I'm not taking that away, of course, but we need to train in a field, somewhere that isn't next to a residential, next to a bloody, you know, a commercial. So the people in our workspace, in our platform, in our headquarters building, are being polluted on a daily basis and it's a given risk. The Green Book members of staff that have never been in a burning building because they chose not to are being exposed, being put at risk. Then on every fire and rescue service in the UK and probably globally, but certainly UK because we've always done it that way. We know we're going to have a burns unit there in the middle of our site.

Simon: 1:31:39

It's ludicrous. Well, it's a trope, isn't it? But nobody signed up for this. Yeah, absolutely.

Ian: 1:31:45

Right, you know. Yeah, you're absolutely right, and Robbie's just explained there. You know we need to train in an environment that we understand. So some of that we can use different methods. You know virtual reality. We can use different methods. Virtual reality plays a big part in this. Now, can I virtually recreate what I would get some of that? So there's a route that we could take to eliminate all that carbonaceous burns.

Ian: 1:32:11

We need to train in a realistic environment, 100%. Do we need to do it at a frequency? We've done it at in the past, every year or every two years? There's a different thought process that needs to go to and Robbie mentioned there about our air quality stuff and working with. The primary reason we, or every two years. There's there's a different thought process that needs to go to and robbie mentioned there about our air quality stuff and working with and the primary reason we're sat in this room is for us now, both services. Now we're sticking in those air quality monitors in areas to actually get some data to go, although we're doing this over here.

Ian: 1:32:35

What's happening over here? Yeah, how is this event that we're training for? And we know how is that affecting the other people in here? By smoke drift the stores, the other ancillary workers, the garages that are in there. Yeah, let's measure those parameters to understand is what we're doing over here affecting what is happening over here for their acute or chronic or long-term health? Is there a link, irrefutably, with the evidence we got? But actually we can now go and go here's, here's the data that we're getting. We're pretty convinced that that is linked to that.

Ian: 1:33:11

Yeah, I'm not an expert, I'm not a professional. We're relying on others in the field to go. I agree with what. I've looked at some of those graphs and you see spike, spike lower down. We talked about exposure limits. It's finding where those limits are. But actually the links between what we've got going over there and what we've got in here is, like you said, robbie, there, stop reduce, do something different. Our risk control measures now that are with that need to be, whatever that comes out of those results and that data. Our risk controls can only be driven by that data. Yeah, it can't be, I think. I think. Yeah, we now have, we now have a tangible, tangible, a different thought process.

Simon: 1:33:55

Yeah, drive that I I'm sorry, but there's also an objective truth here, regardless of where you're coming at it from, that, if you've got fire officers that are being exposed to massive amounts of pollutants and they can't even fucking shower before they go home to their wife and kids, it's abhorrent. Or husband and kids? Yeah, that that's just a nonsense. Like so you know that there is a time for nuance and incremental change and like tweaking and figuring out how to incrementally reduce risk. But also sometimes there's some slam, bloody dunks, just plainly obvious, yeah. And if you can't support a fire service well enough that they can separate themselves from their the clothes that they're wearing in a fire, and I think we're there.

Ian: 1:34:44

We're getting there now. We weren't years ago. We would accept that as that, and you know we have showers on every side and we we have the whole thing is it shower within an hour. So if your exposure yeah, our recommendation is from all, that is actually if you shower within an hour with appropriate products and that and I was a flexi officer years ago, which meant I went out and did some command I would probably at that point, 3 o'clock in the morning, go to the 2 or 3 hours at the incident, come back. I haven't gone back because now the fire engines will stay there. My work is done. I'm going to drive back now to home or wherever I've come from. I'm probably not going to shower because actually it's four o'clock in the morning.

Robbie: 1:35:26

I'm going to wake the whole house up now, or I'm a lazy twat and I'm on a fire station and it's three in the morning. I've had a car fire. I'm absolutely stinking head to toe, but I want to go back to bed. I'm fucked. I my second job to mine and I don't. I'm not going to get on that route. Second jobs. But I'm going back to breastfeeding. I don't know, I'm banging the drum here. Um, those people that aren't given enough time to breastfeed, world health organization guidelines, etc. They say you should have a year. We don't facilitate such that people are coming back early to work because financially they have to if you've just had a child, etc. Um, so we are keen to drag these people in from the streets. Females, everyone come. You know we need to show a proportionate level of people in the organization. However, we're not going to let you breastfeed?

Robbie: 1:36:05

oh fuck off. No, absolutely not. So you can have children, but we're not going to give you the time to do that and we know the risks. We absolutely know the inherent risk if you're gallbladder, etc. I mentioned earlier. But you've got to come back to work because your financial situation is that you need to come back.

Robbie: 1:36:17

Some brigades are giving 12 months off, which is fantastic, which is about right, others mine included or 30, 30 odd weeks, and there's squabbling about it. You know it's, it's miniscule, but it's just that point. You know, let's just allow these people to follow the world health organization recommendation. They may not want to. As soon as little people have teeth, I imagine you don't want to breastfeed anymore. Yeah, around nine or ten months you can knock off a makeup and you can then go back to work. We are almost having to have people come back on the run as operational firefighters and hiding that. I'm not going to tell them I'm breastfeeding because I might be moved, because they won't guarantee my you know my my place on that watch, because six months down the line, 26 weeks later, they might move me for operational reason. So whole the fundamental picture of what we are needs to change. But then the individual that won't shower at three in the morning is equally as to blame as the service that won't provide the shower.

Ian: 1:37:11

Yeah, so it's an all in between. There's definitely that. And if we go back to that analogy of coming back at three o'clock in the morning I've had that in my history you come back and the missus wakes up in the morning and it goes go.

Ian: 1:37:24

You were definitely you were definitely a fire last night so I've brought something back into that environment that wasn't there before. Yeah, did I know that? Yeah, probably did. I think it was that bad. I'm not sure I did at that point, but I do now. So I think the tide is turning with these things, that actually, if I was now that flexi officer, I would go back to the station have a shower now. I wouldn't just drive home that.

Ian: 1:37:45

That's that that thought process is changing the products and if, if you look at those, we're providing people with the, the knowledge and understanding and the products to be able to do that, we can't be the shower police, um, but we can sure as hell make sure that we're helping each other to. Actually, I don't want to take that back to my family and continue that contamination chain on. If we get that education piece on most of our people now. You see an instance robbie's probably noticing it as well. They're behaving differently now to what they did back then. We still need to keep those behaviours and understanding going, but we also need investment to be able to get that across. We need people to understand fully what's going on around them. We're very good sometimes at just taking a don't want to see that, don't want to know that. Do you even?

Simon: 1:38:36

see like posters and things in the fire station telling you about the risks and things. Absolutely, it's starting to become a visible problem in that sense.

Robbie: 1:38:46

In 1982, america legislated for this. So willful blindness, if you want to call it anything. So we have known organisationally, sector-wide, since the 1970s, 60s, asbestosis Back in the 50s, then probably we haven't actioned, that We've had that knowledge, that willful blindness to this event that we're going to find that it's going to bite us on the ass very soon and people will put lots of million pound claims in because of that lack of action. In 2018, a fire station on the south coast would have been impounded. Nothing was done. It's not been cleaned, since it's not a professional clean using the correct products, et cetera.

Robbie: 1:39:20

It's still a risk, and more so now because people are coming back with even more contaminants on them.

Ian: 1:39:26

It's a different contamination piece. You look at the room we're sat in at the moment. If we were sat in here in the 1970s, everything would be wood, carbonaceous linens. We're sat in a typical property plastics. It's not man-made. It is man-made, sorry. It's a totally different environment. If this room was involved in fire, it would be a totally different product of combustion to what it was back then. So the risk is actually increasing. It will burn hotter and it will burn differently. So the whole process, process, everything is constantly evolving.

Ian: 1:40:02

But if you go back to your original question, is the stuff that telling you absolutely, there's posters everywhere, no contaminated kit. You're entering a green zone, an orange zone, a red zone. So our education piece is literally we're firing it at you, we're firing it at you, we're firing it at you. Let's get that familiarity thing that does that. We'd love you to come to one of our fire stations and have a look around and to see the good work that is being done, because we're not only here to say there's work to do, we're here to also say there's good work that is and has been done. We've done massive amounts, massive amounts, but we're not there yet and we need to be it and we need to be.

Robbie: 1:40:38

It's silo working. So Hampshire and the Isle of Wight I've spent probably 10 million on this I would say Surrey, you know. Following behind the bottom line is the Cornwalls, the Durhams, the ones that have perhaps less finance, haven't been able to do anything so disproportionately. They're all members of the Fire Brigades Union or an organisation. They all have the same ailments, the same illness, but they're just disproportionately left alone. It's almost like us and I don't know Karachi in Pakistan doing the same thing. They just can't facilitate it.

Simon: 1:41:07

So I know you can't speak for everybody, but from your perspective and I know this has personally affected you, but it's also personally affected both of you, because you've lost colleagues and friends through this, like it's everything, this is a known trauma to people that work in this sector. What does a part, what does a good pathway forward look like in germany from your perspective? You know we often say this. You know, given the levers of power, unlimited finance, but not even that, just like. How do we get to a point where, even if we say, look, there's a known better place that we can point to say, like the Nordics that seem to be able to get better outcomes here? So it isn't even an unknown, there are some processes and structures and investment that we can put in place to get better outcomes. What's practically that look like? How does the next 10 years play out? We?

Robbie: 1:42:10

will still die in house fires because it's what we do. Soldiers will still die on the front line because it's what they choose to do. We can mitigate that massively. So for me, it is about, firstly, the legislation that we can mitigate that massively. So for me, it is about, firstly, the legislation that has to happen. There has to be an acknowledgement by government that this is a thing, and it currently isn't Medical. We have to have a better screening. So we know the risk. We are inherently aware of that burning building with all that toxic shite coming out of it. But we need better surveillance. We need a yearly test. They're available. They're absolutely out in the market right now. We need a better way of finding things early because we're going to get them. We just need to find the fucker earlier. From. In my case, you know it's too late for a number of us. Our own jet. Bless your soul. Um. The bottom line is had we found it earlier, we would live longer. Um. So better intervention, better medical surveillance, um, and and the initial inception and awareness.

Ian: 1:42:58

Yeah, I think there's also from our industry. So we, we as an overarching body, national fire chiefs council sits above us as sort of it's a governing body as such. So actually from that we're involved in a piece of work, um, that actually set starts to set standards, fire standards. So that is understanding the risk assessment. So there's a body of risk assessments that cover all areas, of contaminants to offices, to frontline stuff, to how we would clean stuff to get that out there. So people have got something to pin it against.

Ian: 1:43:29

We're all working at totally different levels and I'll use an example of an MOT test. An MOT test is at a level that everyone has to get through to get their car through. Have we got something like that within the fire service? Not really. We've got a. This is best guidance. Actually, if we can get out and go, this is what everyone needs to be doing. You can interpret some of those in slightly different ways, but actually if you've got a, you know National Fire Chiefs Council are doing their level best to do all of this right in risk assessments and making sure, right, everyone best to do all of this right in risk assessments and making sure, right, everyone needs to do that. Take that away and and work towards that. You know the funding is. It is a never-ending piece for most public sectors. That yeah, um, we, you know, could there be way more funding?

Simon: 1:44:12

absolutely you could always use more. Always use more money. Nobody's sitting here today saying the answer to this is making sure we have all the money in the world we need.

Robbie: 1:44:20

There's utopia over there. We're reactive, going back to the National Fire Chiefs Council, with respect to them. They have been reactive, they are not proactive. It's a big ship to turn and I understand that there are 30-odd thousand firefighters in the UK. However, they've known about this for too long and they've been inactive for too long. It's taken about a year, 18 months ago, for them to pull their finger out their arse actually and go shit, we're probably going to be legislated for. We're probably going to be sued. We'd better do something and that is not acceptable. We know the risks. There's a quantifiable risk and they have chosen, for whatever reason financially, I would suggest they have chosen to put their fucking head in the sand Unacceptable levels we don't have class and a class action lawsuit Not yet.

Ian: 1:44:59

And the minute the first one comes in, someone's probably going to wake up. That's what it takes and that's what happened in other countries, and USA are a prime example of that. They'll take class actions for everything, won't they? Let's be honest when there's a blame, there's a claim, but at the moment we haven't got anyone going. You knew this was going to happen. You owe me and, but at the moment we haven't got anyone going. You knew this was going to happen. You owe me and I'm taking you to. I'm sure that will come at some point, so we need to head that off, but we also need to do that in a pragmatic way. That actually to do all of this, some of it's really difficult to do and some of it you might never get to Utopia, but some of the things you've described there, they're really simple, quick wins, yeah yeah, and you need to know what good.

Simon: 1:45:39

I think you point to that really well, that you need a vision, you need to know what good looks like, you need to know where you're heading or what to aim for, of course, and it seems to me that that picture isn't quite clear, that there's a bit of work to be done to say this is what we would like to be. Love to know how clean is clean? Yeah, exactly, yeah, exactly that. I think that's the real challenge and I think the the unfairness piece behind this. It is the driver that it shouldn't be down to you to get ill to raise this absolutely, um, and it it shouldn't be your responsibility to be protecting your child from getting ill from this. Five people shouldn't be having to store spur at the beginning of their careers. No, to stop passing on potential disease.

Simon: 1:46:39

There's an unfairness element to this that I don't think. You don't need to be an expert to unpack that pretty quickly and say like this is just inherently unfair and we're putting people at risk. They're already putting themselves on the front line here, um, to carry another risk. They shouldn't have to be carrying for the want of understanding what good looks like and starting to spend the money and put the resources in place. We're never going to remove risk from being in a fire service, but we can mitigate it significantly and if we can recognise some of that.

Ian: 1:47:19

So years ago have lots of our properties are aging. They would have been built in an era that were built for practicality of of firefighting. That was based on at that time. So most services now will have something like a risk management plan, a community risk management plan or an integrated risk management plan which sets out how this fire service will do that they would. They would have historically been being on operational uh preventative measures, looking after the community and such like. Well, within that, uh hampshire. A very good example of that that actually within your property plan there should be something is we will have a healthy environment for people to work in and we will have a contaminant stream within that. That feeds into that.

Ian: 1:48:02

Most services are starting to build that into their work streams, us included. You know it was a little project at one point, a clean person project concept. We called it at that point all those years ago. It's now way, way bigger than that. We know that. So that piece touches nearly every part of that organization. So it's actually a work stream that needs to be in most fire services. I would suggest all fire services Mantra that actually this is a part of it, and at that point I'm one for going well, how am I going to do that then? Because I need some money somewhere. Oh, it's not in our capital budget, or whatever. We haven't thought of that. Well, maybe you need to apportion that budget or whatever.

Ian: 1:48:41

We haven't thought of that. Well, yeah, maybe you need to apportion that it should be ring fence budget. Absolutely, there's x amount of that. We're all, we're all. I've written many business cases that need to sit through governance, like those. Yeah, I want to do this. Um, they go. Well, that's under the health and safety banner. That's it could be. It's not under necessarily that banner. It's under making sure we've got a healthy workforce that can keep going, that we can absolutely look after those people, and actually we, we know that if, if one of our workforce gets ill or whatever, that has a cost both to the person but also to the organization. You're one down now. Yeah, we don't. We don't pluck them as the trees.

Simon: 1:49:18

Yeah, uh, we're not fixing the problem of having four people in a cab versus six people in the cab. Here there's a fundamental let's keep the four-person.

Ian: 1:49:26

Yeah, yeah, absolutely yeah, we understand that.

Simon: 1:49:28

But it's just that where we've got such objective known risks to exposure to severe air quality issues that you should be able to ring-f fence that in a way that you can find the funding and resources to start.

Robbie: 1:49:45

So washing machines I mean hampshire and the isle of wight have made a massive investment recently but it took perhaps nudging from people like myself and embarrassing services um to do the right thing. Washing machines you know we're using domestic washing machines on fire stations to wash ppe. We don't have drying facilities that are adequate to dry our kit, so they will hang for three or four days gassing off toxic dripping because they're only 60% clean. We know that A washing machine will only wash our kit up to 60% of cleanliness.

Simon: 1:50:11

Oh right.

Robbie: 1:50:12

Okay, because it is what it is. Yeah, yeah, the layers and membranes et cetera, there, etc. There are devices. There's a liquid CO2 device out there that gets 99.8% of that crap out. That's too expensive, so we won't go down that route yet. We will hopefully in the future. But it's there. It's just the cost implication. So our kit could be clean, we could eat off it, but we haven't got the money to eat off it. What's the cost of a life? This is it.

Ian: 1:50:38

No one yet has done that, that piece where they've slammed that I'm suing you now.

Simon: 1:50:41

So the cost of that life, yeah most of the people can be sudden that washing machine seems a lot cheaper 400 quid, yeah yeah yeah, and there are other.

Ian: 1:50:50

You know stuff like that. The world is evolving at a really fast pace, that actually new things are being known every time. Yeah, we went back two or three years that LCO2 cleaning probably wasn't even in the mix. Well, now it is because we've moved forward and it's a proven part of that. But actually I'll use a slightly different analogy. We have a managed PPE contract, and so it's managed, and so we don't own any of that. It's a managed PPE contract, so all of our stuff is set away to be washed, so we don't wash it in the house, but it goes away to the company, who will then resupply it to us. So that's how we, as a fire service, have chosen to do our ppe. It's managed, but actually when it comes back we go back to that how clean is clean?

Ian: 1:51:33

yeah it will look it. It will look clean. It might smell clean, but is it clean? I don't know. I'm not a chemist, but actually if you probably went away and really swabbed that closely or did the chemical stuff, you go, well, it could be better if you use that system over there. Yeah, well, yeah, but if we went and used that system over there, we're going to have to spend x amount of money and it's not.

Simon: 1:51:53

Yeah, there's just and I think people can try these shots you can imagine you know the gear, gear coming in from the laundry service, that's managed, all that gear. You're not necessarily gloving up, masking up to handle that gear. You're hanging it out and getting it ready and you know, it's all you know. You shouldn't be expected to have to be thinking of those risks in that moment. There should be protocols and an understanding and processes in place to figure all that stuff out and some of that yeah, and some of it is yeah.

Robbie: 1:52:23

New south wales case in point, final piece for me, I promise new south wales and australia is vast, as we know. I've been a couple of times. It is ginagorous, um, they manage their kit very well, the whole of new south wales. It might be a flying doctor dropping off to farm x, whatever they logistically manage it, it is absolutely doable, um, and they get away with that. I don't know why we all can't, you know, follow the new south wales model. Yeah, we would be in a better place.

Simon: 1:52:46

But again, it's investment most of us work within our budget envelope and actually you know, ultimately the bunny drives the world yeah and I say this at the beginning of every podcast that I do on the introduction that that I believe we already have the tools and knowledge we need to make a difference to the quality of the air that we breathe. For sure, there are examples, as you pointed out, in almost every jurisdiction of a best practice that we there's a lot of learning. We don't have to do yeah, people, you know, if we can find ways of communicating and learning from others and accepting that there's a resource we need to direct to sort this problem out. Often, these answers are there no, we just have to. We don't need to reinvent, we don't need to reinvent the wheel, this, a lot of this stuff that isn't going to require 15 years of research to figure out. A lot of the low-hanging fruit is there for us to pick. Yeah, right now. Don't do that behavior. Don't do that. Don't think like use this piece of equipment, clean it in this way, manage it in this process like these are the that people have been through this.

Simon: 1:53:52

You, you are, you're not unique in what you do. People are doing it all over the world. Yeah and through. We're not the first by purpose of figured out ways to mitigate various elements of this. Join all those up together. Join those up together, you can find yourself in a good place really quickly. Yeah, ian Robbie, it's been amazing talking to you. Thank you very much for allowing us to talk. I can't thank you enough for both taking the time to talk to me but travelling up to meet me here in London. For those tuning in, you'll know that we're recording this live from the Excel from an exhibition that I'm at this week, so it's been an extraordinary effort on your own time to come up and hopefully get the message out, and I think there's a lot for people to learn from this, even if they're not in the fire service or related to it. I think occupational exposure to risks is a problem that many face, and I think this has been a really good example of some of the thinking behind it. So thanks a million for taking the time.

Ian: 1:54:56

I really thanks very much and you're quite welcome to come to our fire stations and have a look around and see it firsthand, if you want.

Simon: 1:55:02

Yes, I think we may take you up on that. I think it'd be a really interesting way to follow up and see what's going to happen. Thank you very much. Thank you, thanks for listening. Before you go, can I ask a favour? If you enjoyed the podcast and know somebody else who might be interested, do spread the word and let's keep building this community. This podcast was brought to you in partnership with Errico AECO, ultra Protect, imbiote and 21 Degrees All great companies who share the vision of the podcast and aren't here by accident. Your support of them helps them support this show. Do check them out in the links and in the show notes and at airqualitymattersnet. Don't forget to check out the YouTube channel by the same name, with plenty more content due to come on that channel. Thanks very much. See you next week.