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Comment by M_Bakhtiari | Hacker News Reader

>We treated firefighters suffering from smoke inhalation

American firefighters don't use SCBA?

You had thousands of folks working 24/7. Assuming you had that many SCBA in the first place (generally you just have enough for a given shift plus some spares, not enough for all the off duty shifts working at the same time as well), how would you propose keeping that many bottles filled? When it takes an hour or more to get to the work-site, are you supposed to take a half dozen extra bottle with you just for the commute?

This was obviously an extraordinary situation, and it seems bizzare to me that you would draw the inference that SCBA is not used in the US...

I obviously don't believe they never use SCBA, but doing physically demanding labour while breathing a toxic atmosphere is not an exercise in heroism, but in futility. Supplying bottles in such a situation is challenging for sure, but I find it hard to believe that going without was at all productive.

I hear a lot of remarks in passing from firefighters that their American peers are rather careless with their personal protection equipment, it would be interesting to hear from one of them.

This event was so far beyond the scale of what is reasonable to plan for though. Consider an engine company that may have 4 firefighters on a typical shift. They probably have 6-7 SCBA to account for equipment failures, etc. So, what happens when you recall all 4 shifts and suddenly have 16-20 firefighters trying to use less than half that number of SCBA? It's a situation with no "right" answer.

I was not at ground zero, but have friends and colleagues that were, and my understanding is that SCBA use was prioritized for the "most" IDLH areas, but that still left a huge number of folks working in areas where, under normal circumstances, you'd absolutely be wearing a pack.

I can only speak for myself and my agency (a suburban combination career/volunteer dept in upstate New York), but we are were careful about PPE usage, air management, etc.

If a firefighter can save ten lives in one day and develop emphysema many years later, it was a worthwhile trade-off. It would be only futile if they dropped dead after every person saved.

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