Scientists, managers partner to reduce severe injuries to wildland firefighters
Even the best-trained and well-resourced firefighter can get seriously, or even fatally, injured while protecting lives and resources. Advancing our understanding about serious injuries—the activities, hazards and conditions when accidents occur—can help managers design more effective prevention measures. This is why a team of Forest Service scientists and risk management specialists studied the types of severe injuries sustained by wildland firefighters and circumstances when they occurred.
To collect information about these issues, they carefully chose additional questions and tracking measures that are now included in our eSafety system. These additional categories allow us to collect information on wildfire-related accidents and help improve our risk management strategies in real time. The study and findings were published in the International Journal of Wildland Fire in June. One key result is that while aviation activities were associated with higher severity injuries, it turned out all other activities had similar injury severities. There were also no significant differences in the severity of injuries based on the geographic area or the type of wildland fire, such as initial attack, extended attack or prescribed fire operations.
Research Forester Erin Belval and fire management specialist Brad Pietruszka study issues affecting the federal wildland fire workforce. This project began when Belval and Pietruszka sought data for a related project. They connected with Alex Viktora, a risk management specialist in Forest Service Fire and Aviation Management who works to keep all levels of agency management informed about risk-related issues, conditions, and needs of personnel on the ground. Early conversations found these parallel research and management efforts could directly inform, benefit and strengthen one another, as well as directly apply to operations to improve the safety of fire personnel.
“One of the most challenging and exciting aspects of this study was to build the dataset and the rating scale. Nothing like this had been done before for wildland firefighters; we were the first to really look at how conditions and injuries were related on this scale,” said Belval, lead scientist on the project.
To analyze injury severity, they developed a rating scale based on 435 severe injuries reported between 2019 and 2023. On that scale, the lowest severity injury required emergency treatment but no hospitalization, while the highest severity resulted in death. The research connects injuries to the conditions and events leading to them and positions managers to design more effective risk management strategies.
“This partnership was critical to making concrete changes in how employee health and well-being data is tracked into the future,” said Brad Pietruszka. “It’s a great illustration of how collaborating with partners in management up front can speed up the process of implementing research results that improve our ability to manage risk.”
Working with a team from Fire and Aviation Management and the Office of Safety and Occupational Health, Viktora incorporated findings from the study into the eSafety program. The co-authors developed a new dataset that classifies injuries in association with contextual factors (activity, hazard exposure) and injury severity so that wildland firefighters and managers could understand the research findings and apply them to their work. “The collaboration with Rocky Mountain Research Station was absolutely critical to the development of the newest fire-related questions that we have added to eSafety.”
The study results and the new questions in eSafety will improve injury and hazard data quality and tracking efforts for managers to monitor trends and identify opportunities to reduce risk to Forest Service fire personnel.
“I truly appreciate the collaboration with Fire and Aviation Management. Alex Viktora’s expertise helped ensure that our interpretation of results was grounded in the context of real fire operations,” said Belval. “It was rewarding to see how quickly our research efforts were used to help inform ongoing changes to make this work safer.