SAN ANTONIO – It is a statistic the San Antonio Fire Department is beyond proud to announce: no firefighter has died from cancer since 2023. It is a big decrease from the eight deaths reported from 2013 to 2023.
“I was with the hazmat team when I first started out, with the chemicals and what have you,” Lt. Carlos Esquivel said, who has served with the department for 25 years.
Four years ago, Esquivel showed up to the firefighter wellness fair, which offers cancer screenings.
“The fair, it caught my cancer. I had melanoma. I was able to take care of it,” Esquivel said. “It’s one of the quickest spreading cancers, so if you don’t catch it, if we wouldn’t have had this fair, I don’t think I’d have gone to a dermatologist.”
When it was mentioned that the outcome could have been different, he said, “Yes, you’d be talking to my wife.”
In 2018, KSAT interviewed the wife of firefighter Todd “Woody” Woodcock, who died of cancer in 2016. His death prompted changes that KSAT has been covering for the past eight years.
SAFD started changing cleaning and equipment protocols. KSAT even got a look inside the program that swaps out dirty gear after fires. Those big changes became a model for departments in other cities.
Firefighters who had been around a while repeatedly told KSAT that it used to be a badge of honor to have dirty gear.
“If you were dirty, it showed you worked hard,” Esquivel said.
He admits it took a massive effort to break away from that mindset.
“A huge culture shift. Everybody’s big and macho until you’re not big and macho,” Esquivel said.
“It really makes a big difference,” said SAFD firefighter and paramedic Apolinar Lerma, who joined the department four and a half years ago during the cancer-prevention culture shift.
Lerma also got a diagnosis after one of the wellness fairs, where he did an EsoGuard test, which looks for esophageal cancer.
“Got it done, didn’t think anything of it. About a month later, I saw I had a voicemail,” Lerma said.
Lerma had tested positive for Barrett’s Esophagus, a condition that can turn into cancer if it’s not caught on time.
“Esophageal cancer, it’s one of those that people don’t usually know until it’s too late,” Lerma said. “It was scary, eye-opening.”
He said he is proud to work for a department that has not had one cancer-related firefighter death in three years.
“To be a large department like this and hit those markers, that is overwhelming. I don’t know any other department that can do this,” said SAFD Emergency Services Deputy Chief Brandon Murray. “We swap your gear out, we give you opportunities to take a shower, we give you opportunities to clean yourself, your gear, the apparatus.”
Murray said he’s proud of the firefighters themselves, who have bought into the new protocols.
“They’ve sat down, they’ve educated themselves, they’ve taken this job seriously and decided they’re going to take their health seriously, and we’ve been on a positive streak since then,” he said.
The three parts of the cancer-free initiative involve education through wellness fairs, department policies like those already enacted, and buy-in from city leaders.
“We got buy-in from city management by allowing us to do the wellness fair on duty. People can come while they’re on duty,” Murray said. “We also got more buy-in when they bought a second set of gear for every firefighter, so you will never have to be sitting in dirty gear, ever.”
The next wellness fair is scheduled for Feb. 7-8 at the Fire Training Academy, 300 S. Callaghan Road. Murray urged retired firefighters to attend as well.
“Retirees, you need to come. We want you to come,” Murray said. “This is not just for active firefighters. We want to take care of those who went before us.”
The fairs offer screenings for skin and esophageal cancer, as well as full-body scans. Firefighters also receive information on where to get scans for other types of cancers.
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