Firefighters from across Massachusetts came to Chelsea on September 3 to mark ten years since the death of Chelsea Firefighter Peter Kannler, who died of occupational cancer ten years ago. The Chelsea Fire Department and the Massachusetts Firefighting Academy held the ceremony together. Kannler served the Chelsea department for nine years and also taught at the academy, according to the city’s announcement.
Occupational cancer
Cancer is the leading cause of line-of-duty death among firefighters in the United States, ahead of heart attacks and ahead of fire itself. The mechanism is exposure: modern building contents burn into a mix of known carcinogens, and firefighters absorb them through the skin, through the lungs at overhaul when the masks come off, and from contaminated gear worn back to the station and stored in the truck cab.
Massachusetts recognizes this in law. General Laws chapter 32, section 94B, presumes that certain cancers in a uniformed member of a paid fire department were suffered in the line of duty, if the member passed a physical on entry that showed no sign of the disease and served at least five years. The presumption covers cancers of the skin, breast, lung and respiratory tract, and the central nervous, lymphatic, digestive, hematological, urinary, skeletal, oral, reproductive and prostate systems, where the cancer is of a type that can result from heat, radiation or a known or suspected carcinogen. The presumption can be rebutted only by a preponderance of evidence that non-service factors caused it. A firefighter who discovers the cancer within five years of leaving the job is still covered.
The practical effect is that a firefighter with one of those cancers, or the firefighter’s family, does not have to prove which fire caused it in order to receive disability or death benefits.
The department’s own losses
Chelsea’s fire department has buried more than one member to cancer and to the diseases of the job. Captain John T. O’Driscoll Jr., the department’s retired arson investigation captain, died this month at 76. The Kannler ceremony is the kind of event that departments hold partly for the family and partly for the young firefighters in the room, who are the reason the academy now teaches decontamination at the scene as a core skill.
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