To test the hypothesis that firefighter exposures may increase cancer risk, mortality rates were calculated for 3,066 San Francisco Fire Department firefighters employed between 1940 and 1970. Vital status was ascertained through 1982, and observed and expected rates, rate ratios (RR), and 95% confidence intervals (CI) were computed using United States death rates for comparison. The total numb...

This paper describes research that developed a prototype chemical and biological (CB) protective firefighter suit. It is presented as a case study demonstrating an integrated systems approach to designing, developing and evaluating a protective clothing ensemble based on end user requirements. It includes a discussion of the process that was used to gain an understanding of firefighter performa...

Firefighters’ safety is a critical problem and a major issue is the lack of reliable indoor firefighter localization. State of the art approaches have failed to provide an automatic, accurate and reliable solution to localize firefighters in harsh environments. This paper presents a novel system to achieve this goal, by combining pedestrian dead reckoning with a recently emerging breadcrumb sys...

Studies show significant association between cancer risk and being a firefighter. Firefighter bunker gear often contains carcinogens that firefighters may absorb through contact or inhale through off-gassing, thereby increasing cancer risk. Awareness of increased cancer risk has given rise to policies and practices focused on gear cleaning and decontamination processes to decrease risk, yet the...

The introduction of innovative information technologies is frequently pursued to improve the on-site decision-making and hence the effectiveness of emergency response processes. Yet, the practical potential of innovative firefighter information technologies hardly has been investigated so far. In this paper, we present the results of a study, in which we interviewed 21 members of German fire de...

Two persistent resource management issues that arise in coordinated emergency response efforts are the timely delivery of accurate resource data to decision makers and effective methods for maintaining personnel accountability. Most emergency response agencies rely on manual systems to address each of these issues separately. These manual systems are often inefficient and hinder the effectivene...

Physics-Based Wildfire Model Track: EMS, Fire, Disaster Management Author(s): Charles Hall An advanced, physics-based supercomputer/GIS wildfires modeling system has been developed that incorporates chemistry, radiation physics, the local weather and its decisive two-way interactions with the fire, the effects of complex terrain on weather and fire behavior, and represents fuel in three dimensi...