When your toddler self was learning to walk and talk, your mind was blissfully ignorant of death and mortality. When your teenage self was learning to drive, you knew death existed. But, of course, it only happened to other people — you were invincible.
Let’s face it, many of us carried that deluded sense of immortality out of our teens, through the fire academy and well into our fire career.
Then, it happened. “It” might have been a near-death experience. A serious illness like cancer or a cardiac event. It might have been the loss of someone close — that best friend or sibling who died in a car crash or a weapons mishap.
It was then that you knew, really knew, that you too were going to die one day. You could hear your life’s timer banging away with each tick of the countdown. You could imagine all too clearly what the world would look like with you not in it.
Rational folks use this realization to take steps to slow that timer’s march to zero. As firefighters, taking those rational steps to extend life is even more critical because the professional risks we face only speed up that timer.
In 2023, PBS News Hour reported that firefighters have a life expectancy 10 years shorter than those in the general population. Others have made similar shorter lifespan claims about police and EMS.
Can that be true? Ten years seems a long time.
There’s some evidence that being a firefighter may actually extend your life. A 2006 study looked at mortality rates for firefighters in Hamburg, Germany and compared them with both the general population in Hamburg and Germany. They found that firefighters lived a couple of years longer, especially when they joined the fire service early in adulthood.
The researchers concluded this was partly due to firefighters being more physically fit than the general population.
Another article written in 2014 by the Center for Retirement Research for Boston College dove into the data from police and fire insurance payouts in five states and two municipalities (Dallas and Washington, D.C.). That analysis asked: if firefighters avoided injury or illness until retirement at age 60, could they be expected to live longer than the general population?
The answer was no, but only slightly. That analysis showed that male firefighters and police would live to 84 and women to 86. The general population could expect to live to 85 years old for men and 87 for women. As with the German study, the difference is minor.
Most studies look at career firefighters. A Danish report published in 2018 also included part-time and volunteer firefighter mortality. Those researchers found the non-career firefighters had a better life expectancy than the career firefighters. Some of that they attributed to non-career firefighters living in more rural areas.
Of course, none of this data is permission to spend the next five years living out the Super Size Me life. (You remember, the 2004 documentary in which the late film maker Morgan Spurlock ate only fast food for 30 days, vowing to say yes when offered a supersize portion?)
“Even if the science isn’t fully there on firefighter life expectancy, we have to revert to known best practices,” says Sara Jahnke, a leading industry researcher who launched the Science to the Station: A Health & Wellness Alliance, a platform to bring important firefighter health and wellness science to firefighters.
“There are things we know,” she says. “We know that we will all die. We know there are choices we can make to better our chances of dying later rather than sooner. We know that better sleep. diet, exercise and avoiding tobacco and alcohol will allow us to live longer — assuming the unexpected doesn’t happen, like getting hit by a meteorite or something.”
Job-related choices don’t get a pass either. You could build a multi-volume set of SOPs and SOGs on what you should do to improve our chances of not being killed, injured or inflicted with serious illness while on the job. Some of those are better followed than others.
Jahnke says it is equally important to remember that following known best life practices — like getting six to eight hours of sleep per night, eating whole, lightly processed food, not using tobacco, and strength training at least twice per week — is as much about improving the quality of the years left as it is about extending the quantity of years.
“We shouldn’t still be dying from cardiovascular disease and cancer at the level that we are,” Jahnke says. “There’s so much that is in our control.”
Firefighting is inherently dangerous in both the long and short term. Using SCBA during an interior push keeps you alive in those moments. Using SCBA during overhaul can keep you alive well past retirement. While there are enforceable SOPs for when to wear PPE, it is up to us to police our own behaviors when it comes to diet, sleep and exercise. These behaviors also have short- and long-term consequences on length and quality of life.
Remembering that the research on good health outcomes is ongoing is also important, according to Jahnke. The beautiful thing about research is that it builds upon itself and adapts to changing times.
For example, cardiovascular disease has long been a leading cause of early death for firefighters, while long Covid has emerged as a threat we still don’t fully understand. Dr. Denise Smith, a firefighter cardiovascular researcher with Skidmore College and newly appointed director of the U.S. Fire Administration’s National Fire Research and Data Center, is examining the relationship between heart disease and long Covid.
“Dr. Smith’s work will help us understand what additional threats firefighters face regarding cardiovascular health if they have had or contract long Covid,” Jahnke says. “Both of these illnesses can affect firefighters well beyond their retirement date.”
There was also research published in 2024 that looked at how firefighter health varies based on the rank they hold within the department. While these researchers concluded that more work was needed, it highlights the importance of how firefighting affects the person over different stages of life.
“Likewise, the National Firefighter Registry for Cancer can provide incredible insights into the relationship between firefighting and cancer-related illness and death over an entire working lifetime,” Jahnke says. “While that research is designed to look at a wide swath of firefighters, many historically underrepresented in research, it requires voluntary participation. And that participation by firefighters has been woefully low.”
So as your wiser self comes to grips with your own mortality, making the best choices is key to a longer and healthier life. And getting involved with firefighter wellness research is a way to give future firefighters even more tools to make sound choices when they finally realize that none of this lasts forever.
