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The 2026 wildfire season was recently declared over. For wildland firefighters, though, the long-term health toll is finally being taken more seriously, with a Eugene-based advocacy group and Oregon lawmakers pushing for more protections.
Will Harling woke up one day with what felt like a hangover.
But when he felt a golf ball-sized knot under his jawline, he went to the hospital. That summer night in 2024, doctors said he had a fast-growing olfactory neuroblastoma, a rare cancerous tumor that begins in the upper part of the nasal cavity. It can travel through bone into the brain and eyes.
For Harling, who’s been fighting fires for roughly 30 years, it was a harsh reminder.
“We are not invincible,” he said.
If my lungs were a PurpleAir sensor, and you could read it throughout my life, it would tell a very grisly tale.
Will Harling, firefighter
Season after season, Harling worked under a dull orange sun and in the smoke-shrouded Pacific Northwest as a longtime U.S. Forest Service biologist, on‑call wildland firefighter and burn boss in the Klamath Mountains.
Emerging research and policy analysis are increasingly pointing to evidence that long-term exposure to hazardous wildfire smoke is associated with causing cancer. It’s a story Harling has lived, along with a generation of firefighters asking questions about the long-term effects of the job for themselves and the future workforce.
They, and their advocates — some based out of Eugene — are pushing for changes, to move toward a culture of safety and policy that better protects its workforce.
‘We’ve got to save their lives’
“These people are saving our lives, so we’ve got to save their lives,” said Lisa Moeller.
Moeller is a retired physician assistant and board member of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology, an advocacy group based in Eugene that is aimed at promoting safe and ecological wildland firefighting and management.
She tracks research about wildfire smoke and firefighter health. And she notes that a majority of studies done thus far have been on male cohorts, not accounting for biological impacts on women.
Regardless of their gender, though, wildland firefighters are “camping next to where a fire is and inhaling smoke overnight, and then they’re working 15- to 16-hour days and then getting about six hours of sleep in an uncomfortable situation,” Moeller said.
These people should get regular pulmonary checks, cardiology checks and stress tests.
Lisa Moelle, advocate
Shifts like these can last up to 14 consecutive days, until guidelines mandate a minimum of three consecutive days off, after which firefighters can be recalled to the line, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.
“It’s not just inhaling that’s harmful,” Moeller said, adding that smoke gets absorbed through the skin and mucous membranes (the wet surfaces of your eyes, nose and mouth).
“In medicine, we don’t have any screening guidelines for firefighters,” she said. “Right now, a lot of these people aren’t getting compensated, don’t have health insurance and aren’t even getting care,” she said.
Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology is among the advocacy organizations working with wildland firefighters’ concerns over long-term struggles.
The fight has reached the halls of Congress.
On Capitol Hill, U.S. Rep. Maxine Dexter and U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley, both Oregon Democrats, introduced the Wildland Firefighter Health and Safety Act in mid-September.
They breathe smoke so our communities can breathe easier.
U.S. Rep. Maxine Dexter
The legislation would create a task force and an advisory panel dedicated to improving wildland firefighter health.
The legislation also would establish a pilot program working with agencies nationwide to develop safe, effective respiratory protection. It also requires the federal government to establish specific safety regulations for wildland firefighting to ensure adequate workers compensation.
“As a pulmonologist and critical care physician, I’ve seen what unfettered smoke exposure does to firefighters,” Dexter, who worked in medicine before entering politics, said at a September press conference. “I’ve cared for people with acute smoke and burn injury, as well as chronic lung disease in nonsmokers due to the smoke exposure with their work. It’s devastating and it’s preventable.”
For firefighters currently on the line or those who have hung up their boots, the bill represents a first step toward getting care for a group that has been ignored for decades.
Culture shift
Tiffan Thoele never received any cardiac evaluation that could screen for cancer after retiring.
Credit: Courtesy Tiffan Thoele
For seven years, she watched her magnetic name tag cling to the wall of the Redmond Smokejumper Base — a daily signal that she would be first on the fire line.
When the alarm rang, she threw on her jumpsuit equipped with a harness fit, a letdown rope in one leg pocket, a pack-out bag in the other leg pocket and a day bag between the harness legs and boarded the aircraft.
Circling over the fire, streamers would drop to survey wind and then the plane’s canopy would open.
Thoele would plunge herself into the amber sky.
“After all of that buildup, it’s just like the most peaceful thing in the world,” she said. “You’ll see the smoke, but you see this field of green if it’s Oregon.”
But that peace didn’t last for long. On the ground, the smokejumpers provide a rapid initial attack on wildfires.
A typical job could take several days deep in the backcountry, sleeping on the line, surrounded by smoke, Thoele said.
Thoele got her start in wildland firefighting in the late 1980s on a crew in Lowell. She bounced around Oregon on different hotshot crews, eventually becoming a rookie smokejumper at the Redmond base in 1995. She was one of the first women at the base.
Spending more than a decade as a firefighter, Thoele noted firsthand how the risks of long-term smoke exposure were rarely discussed.
“Among some it was almost a badge of honor how much smoke you could suck, how long you could be in really thick smoke,” she said.
For crews, lifelong effects were not in the forefront of their minds, she said. “I remember people saying, ‘Well, you know, your lungs recover incredibly well. This isn’t something that’s a long‑term problem.’”
She’s in her late 50s now. And while Thoele hasn’t been diagnosed with any cancer or serious lung disease, she counts herself as lucky and wishes she had known more about the risk.
Anything that can improve a firefighter’s health on the line, actively or proactively or post‑actively, is a good thing.
Tiffan Thoele, retired firefighter
“They did so much training on how to keep yourself physically safe on the fire line, but the long‑term effects of being exposed to the things you’re exposed to weren’t part of the conversation,” she said.
Pushing onward
Harling, the firefighter who was diagnosed with the neuroblastoma, is back on the line with a new approach to how he thinks about firefighting.
“A lot of that invincibility was replaced with the strength of vulnerability,” he said. “All of a sudden it wasn’t about me, it was about what I was leaving behind me.”
“I just think of my kids and how close they were to not having a father,” he said.
When Harling was diagnosed with the cancer, he had a 13% chance of surviving the next five years. Over five months, he endured intense chemotherapy and radiation treatment.
He was declared in remission shortly after.
Back at it as a burn boss, he is focused on firefighter health, starting with putting on his own full-face respirator.
“We need to compensate our firefighters for the impacts that they’re receiving and the risks that they’re taking,” he said. “It’s very out of step with what they’re actually getting paid and the protective gear they’re actually getting provided to do their job.”
