Fire, land management and emergency workers can be exposed to a range of hazards and risks when completing work tasks. These may vary depending on the incident type, the urgency of response and environmental conditions.

Given the nature of emergency response work, it has been acknowledged that established safe work practices and risk management approaches that apply in non-emergency situations may not be appropriate to use while responding to an emergency. Additionally, the practice of prescribed burning gives rise to situations where it is impossible for workers to avoid some exposure to bushfire smoke. Agencies have an obligation to ensure that their responders are protected from hazards, as far as reasonably practicable, regardless of whether they are responding to an emergency or not.

Bushfire smoke is dangerous. It’s full of tiny suspended fine particulate matter, measuring only 2.5 micrometres (written as PM2.5). To get an idea of how small that is, a micrometre is 1000 times smaller than a millimetre. Particles that size easily get into your lungs and cause inflammation, resulting in symptoms like itchiness, coughing, watery eyes and sneezing. They get into your bloodstream and affect your respiratory, cardiovascular and immune systems and change your body’s chemical functions.

Also present in bushfire smoke are toxic contaminants like carbon monoxide, respiratory irritants (particles, formaldehyde, acrolein) and volatile organic compounds (like benzene).

That’s concerning when it’s just for a few days a year, but now that many firefighters have already clocked up over 100 days and the summer’s not yet over, there’s a debate about whether enough is being done to protect them.