Investigation of toxic chemicals transfer through clothing layers of fire suits

The adverse impact of toxic fire products on fire-fighters’ health and wellbeing are of a world-wide concern. The occurrence of cancers and other severe health conditions among the fire-fighters increase at the alarming rate in both developed and developing countries. Although fire and rescue personnel follow strict decontamination regimes after the fire-fighting, this approach only seems to tackle toxicants deposited on the surfaces of the outer clothing. Unfortunately, the toxic products can penetrate, get ‘trapped’ in or transferred through the layers of protective gear. As a result, the skin of first responders may come into contact with the toxicants during or after fire-fighting. The chemical nature and concentration levels of the toxic products ‘absorbed’ by fire suits has not been investigated adequately. The overall aim of the project is multifaceted. At the initial stages, we will investigate whether ‘breathable’ elements of fire-fighters clothing allow the transport of toxic chemicals, present in the fire effluent, towards the skin. Secondly, we will determine the nature of toxic chemicals and evaluate their concentration levels through appropriate analytical techniques. The use of heat transfer and advanced computational models and the developed analytical methods will fully quantify the transfer of toxic chemicals through the layers of fire suits. We envisage to generate a dataset that will include the concentration levels of toxic chemicals, transported through protective clothing, as functions of several variables (e.g., temperature, fuel composition and load, duration of exposure, air flow, etc.)