Spring’s Assistant Fire Chief Advocates Cancer Prevention at International Conference

by Hannah Falcon

Spring Fire Department Assistant Chief Robert Logan co-authored the Lavender Ribbon Report released at this month’s Fire-Rescue International Conference in Dallas, Texas. The report outlines ‘11 Best Practices’ for preventing firefighter cancer.

Logan volunteered to help with the report after hearing about it at a conference for the International Association of Fire Chiefs Volunteer-Combination Officer Section.

“The goal of the report is to provide an 11 step ‘Best Practice’ plan for fire departments to implement cancer prevention plans into their department,” Logan said. “In the report there is a list of 11 steps that any firefighter, regardless of if they’re full time, part time or volunteer, can follow to prevent cancer.”

Cancer, now a top cause of firefighter death, is an epidemic in the fire service. Spring Fire has been doing a number of the things outlined in the report to prevent firefighter cancer, such as using two sets of gear, decontamination systems and yearly physicals.

“Cancer is the thing I worry about the most for the young firefighters,” Logan said. “It feels like everywhere you turn, firefighters are getting cancer. I want to change the culture of the dirty gear and dirty helmets. It’s not glorious to die of cancer. So I want to change it for the new guys coming in and have the best practices be the only way they’ve ever done it.”

The practices were all designed to be cost efficient so that departments do not have to spend a lot of money to keep their firefighters healthy.

“(The report) teaches people what they can do to help rather than having fire departments spend a lot of money to follow these best practices. It’s really just ingraining in people what the best thing to do is that’s not going to cost a lot of money,” Logan said.

All eight of the co-authors on the Lavender Ribbon Report used personal experience in addition to research to develop the practices.

“All of the coauthors have personal experience with what works and what doesn’t work in our own fire departments,” Logan said. “At Spring Fire we had been using two hoods and that was something I wrote on, talking about how it helps if you can’t afford two sets of gear you can have two sock hoods because that is the piece that gets the most contaminated.”

Logan plans to hang up the 11 Best Practices in all the Spring Fire stations and enforce them along with pre-existing guidelines.

“I feel honored to be involved in the report. I was very blessed to be chosen to coauthor. I’m very passionate about it because I’ve had a lot of close friends die from cancer,” Logan said. “I really hope that fire departments implement these best practices because there’s things that don’t cost money that can save people’s lives.”

Read the report co-authored by Asst. Chief Logan by clicking here: https://www.iafc.org/docs/default-source/1vcos/vcoslavendarribbonreport.pdf?sfvrsn=13f88b0d_4.

Hannah Falcon is a sophomore Communication major at Texas A&M University. A Staff Writer and Life & Arts Editor for the Texas A&M Battalion, Falcon is spending the summer as a volunteer writer for Spring Fire Community News.