Firefighters Need New Respirators

The image of Firefighters is one that is shared across the United States.  The people who risk their lives for complete strangers are in danger themselves.  It is common knowledge that firefighters that wear self contained breathing apparatus (SCBA).  During vehicle fires than opposed to structural fires, it is less common that firefighters wear the self contained breathing apparatus.  These breathing apparatus have some negative effects to being a pain to put on by wasting a lot of time.  It was a common belief that less health risks are due to vehicle fires, but this was recently disapproved.  At the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health in Cincinnati, Ohio, Kenneth Fent and his team found that firefighters rescuing vehicle fires are almost ten times the acceptable levels of seventy-five very unstable organic compounds that encompassed benzene, acetonitrile, and acetone.  In the research, Kenneth Fent and his team collected air samples common to where firefighters breath and found that the exposure of mixture of the combination of chemicals and calculated a hazard index of 9.2 times the acceptable amount of the chemicals.  The researches realized that the highest amount of chemicals in the given area were carbon monoxide and 1,3-butadiene.  The problem with this problem is that it is hard to make an air purifier that deals with all of the dangers chemical that Firefighters face every day.  An expert in toxicology, Claire Austin, stated in the article that one of the problems with developing the air purifier is that many people do not know what chemicals are released when the vehicle explodes.  The future holds researchers to investigate the fumes that are produced by fire due to hybrid and electric cars and to use new moniters to collect even more gases that firefighters can endanger their health and see what all chemicals are being exposed.  I found this article very interesting and important because I did not realize all of the chemicals involved in the explosions involved in structural and vehicle fires.  I do believe we should invest a lot more money in this because firefighters are putting their lives on the line everyday so that I and everyone else can be assured that we are safe. 

See http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/News/2011/January/28011102.asp

Posted by Kelly Kuppler