This episode is sponsored by Transcend, a veteran owned and operated performance optimization company that I introduced recently as a sponsor on this show.
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Welcome to the Behind the Shield podcast. As always, my name is James Gearing, and this week it is my absolute honor to welcome on the show firefighter spouse and the woman who uncovered the PFAS in our firefighter turnouts, Diane Cotter.
Now in this conversation, we discuss a host of topics from her early life, meeting her firefighter husband Paul, the cold storage warehouse fire in Worcester,
Paul's cancer diagnosis, how that led Diane in a search for carcinogens in the fire service, what forever chemicals are, the resistance she had from trusted companies and organizations,
what needs to change, and so much more. Now, before we get to this incredible conversation, as I say every week, please just take a moment.
Go to whichever app you listen to this on, subscribe to the show, leave feedback and leave a rating. Every single five star rating truly does elevate this podcast, therefore making it easier for others to find.
And this is a free library of almost 1000 episodes now. So all I ask in return is that you help share these incredible men and women stories,
so I can get them to every single person on planet earth who needs to hear them. So with that being said, I introduce to you, Diane Cotter. Enjoy.
Well, then I want to start by saying two things. Firstly, thank you to our mutual friend, Jim Bernica, who I think was the original person that made the connection. And secondly, I want to welcome you onto the Behind the Shield podcast today.
Thank you.
So where on planet earth are we finding you this morning?
In Rindge, New Hampshire.
Beautiful. Well, I know that your story is, you know, around Massachusetts and some other areas. So let's start the very beginning of your timeline. So tell me where you were born and tell me a little bit about your family dynamic, what your parents did, how many siblings.
So I was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, out of the Commonwealth. It's probably best known for the city of three deckers or three deckers, as we say with our accent.
And I grew up in a trim, probably what you would have to call a traumatic circumstances. My father was a city icon. He ran a beautiful Lowe's Poli Palace and lived probably a very, oh, I guess you would call it a very electric life.
I mean, electric because he was affiliated with the movie stars of the era. Al Pacino was one and some big names from the 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s. He had a beautiful career.
And my mom was a stay at home mom, and she she suffered terribly from alcoholism. So I think my father's lifestyle led her to heal herself and medicate herself the only way she knew she had two suicide attempts.
By the time I was 10 and was institutionalized, had shock therapy treatment. And I think by the time I was 12 years old, the final blow came. We lost our home to my father's gambling debts.
So that said that that truly shaped me to insulate myself. And I loved, loved my privacy. I can't tell you how much I loved my privacy.
Even growing up in the 70s, when I met Paul, I was 16 years old, almost 17. And he was very gregarious. I could always wear a smile because, you know, my father was in the hospitality business.
So we knew how to act appropriately, as you know, my father engaged us with movers and shakers of the day. And but when I met Paul, I can remember the effects of trauma that I see now.
If he took me to two towns out of Worcester, you know, even at 17 years old, my body would react by shaking uncontrollably.
Took many years to figure that all out.
So he literally was, you know, when I was with him and met him, I fell in love the second I saw him, literally saw stars when I saw him.
And I felt so safe in his arms. He had a very wholesome upbringing. He's Armenian and Irish and I'm Irish and Italian. His family was very involved in the church. And I loved that. I love that structure.
So with Paul, there was just such beautiful peace in our home. We had a very peaceful home, except, you know, I go sideways every now and then.
When you look back now, because clearly, you know, there was an element of torment in both your mother and father's side. I mean, I think, you know, the the needing to be around all the people and the fame and the parties and on the other side, obviously, the alcoholism.
When we reverse engineer, obviously, it's usually, you know, generations prior, that's kind of adding to that snowball.
Were you close to the grandparents? Did you had any understanding of how your parents grew up and maybe what the origin story was of their struggles?
I found out at 48 years old.
Oh, really?
Uh huh.
My mom protected herself with alcohol.
She was abused by her father and I didn't know that until I was 48 years old.
He died of alcoholism and my brother died of alcoholism five years ago.
So it runs in the family and I've struggled with it during the five year war.
You know, I definitely struggled with alcohol.
This is what's interesting as well.
It's nature and nurture.
You know, I mean, you've obviously got an environment that is causing a void that then someone is trying to fill.
It might be alcohol, might be gambling, it might be whatever.
But then you've also got that kind of epigenetics element where, yes, the body, you know, is is starting to shift.
So then that's passing to the next generation, too.
So you're kind of fighting two things at the same time.
You know, you're fighting alcoholism, you're fighting alcoholism, you're fighting alcoholism, you're fighting alcoholism.
You're kind of fighting two things at the same time when you're trying to break that cycle.
Oh, 100 percent, James, 100 percent.
After the war ended and when Ed Kelly took over the union and I had the year of healing, I call 2023.
It literally started in January of 2023 when Ed Kelly celebrated Paul and myself and Last Call Foundation,
Ethereal Films, Rob and Elijah at the premiere of Burned.
I mean, it was just such a 180 from the previous administration.
And that began a year of healing because that was when I was able to have
really tough conversations with the men that had shunned us.
So one of my dearest friends, who I can tell you I love, I love this man, is President Rich McKinnon,
the PFFM president of Massachusetts.
So Richie and I go back maybe till about 2016 when I started messaging him and talking with him.
And we were what I'd consider allies on this segment in this lane of PFAS and turnout gear.
And then there was an article written about me by Eric Lamar, who was first to discover this issue.
Eric Lamar wrote quite a few articles about the Fox and the Hen House.
But I think like me, people didn't take him seriously, you know, for reasons I don't know.
Maybe it was the way that he went about it.
And Eric Lamar wrote an article about WIFI, don't worry about your health and safety, because WIFI got us.
And I posted that because by this time I was having a lot of trouble with the
Schaeffberger administration for not acting on this issue.
And I got a call from my friend and ally, Rich McKinnon, who, you know, who's more or less said,
we're not going to have anything to do with you, Diane.
And that devastated me and frightened me.
And I feared for my life at that point because I was literally playing with fire.
So I called someone very close to me and let him know that happened in case something happened to me.
I wasn't afraid of President McKinnon, but I knew I was in deep, deep, deep water, deep, deep water.
At that moment, I then decided that this person, who I'll name in the memoir, Products of Deception,
this person would need to know everything I did every step of the way in case I turned up missing.
And that's what I did.
So I let this person know everything I was doing. If I sent an email, this person also got a copy of
that email. That way it was a people needed to know what I was doing because I was notifying the
Department of Justice, the FBI, I was trying to make movement happen, Congressional, etc.
So in any event, in going back to an issue that we call the shunning,
the shunning went on for a number of years.
And I described the shunning as, say, you go to church and everybody that you sit with knows you
and you're smiling with and talking with, and then you go to church and everybody that you sit with
and talking with, and then all of a sudden nobody will meet your eyes.
That's what happened to Paul and I for four years, the shunning went on.
That changed in 2023 when Ed Kelly made it perfectly clear of the importance of the body of work
that Paul and I, Last Call Foundation, etc. had produced. When he decided to premiere Burned,
I had nothing to do with these arrangements, of course, but when he decided to premiere Burned
in Las Vegas in January 2023 and bring Paul and I up on stage, literally with some of the people
in the audience who I know what was said about me, that was a line in the sand. And in that moment,
we had a great healing. I had some very deep conversations. I had one particularly hard
and beautiful conversation with Richie Mack, and we came out of it instantly the moment that
conversation, which was raw, and could have gone sideways real fast, could have gone real sideways
real fast, real fast. But I think Richie and I both healed in that moment. So much so
that when we just signed in Massachusetts our legislation to remove PFAS in turnout gear by 2027,
when Kathy and I were there for that moment, as was our Senator Michael Moore, who initiated the
act, as well as Governor Healy herself, who I also sparred with for a number of years, because I felt
that she was looking to see what the union was doing and not acting in a way that she could.
And I think people were wondering how was this going to go with Carter at the event.
When the governor signed the paperwork on the bill, Senator Moore turned around and said,
where's Diane? And he handed me the pen that the governor had just handed him. In the second
moment, Governor Healy handed President McKinnon the pen that she signed the next initial,
and he yelled out, he's a huge man, tall in structure, in girth, and the booming voice.
And he turned around and said, Diane! And handed me the pen.
And that was what a beautiful, beautiful moment. We've been through the war together and come out
the other side.
We'll get into this, but one of the least discussed elements when it comes to mental health
in the fire service is organizational betrayal. And I've had it myself. For eight years now,
I've been talking about all things, including the fire service, the fire department, the
police, the fire department. I've been doing all things, including the cancer,
the sleep deprivation, the suicide and everything else. And locally, with, I would say not even
no support, but opposition. And you kind of take a step back and when you are advocating for these
very people, for this very profession, to be completely honest, such cowardice in a profession
to just simply go in against the grain because what we're doing isn't working.
And so I can relate to that.
There's a paradigm shift now when it comes to changing the firefighter work we don't
start to see, which is amazing.
And some of these more courageous thought leaders, fire departments are starting to
progress on that.
And then simultaneously fitness standards and changing the bunker gear to ones that
don't have people.
I mean, these are all parts of the same conversation, but the energy that's put into opposing, to
turning your back to talking shit about, you know, the phrases, oh, it'll never happen.
There'll be, you know, all this stuff.
It's become, to be honest, nauseating because, you know, when it'd be one thing if it was
just you're fighting to get more, more money or more overtime, you know, so you can buy
your bigger truck.
But we're talking about stopping the funerals and it blows my mind that there's so much
fucking resistance to advocating for our health.
I first heard the word organizational betrayal on your podcast and I thought, oh my God,
that's exactly what happened.
You see, James, you're part of the organization.
I'm not.
I had no business in this.
I just wanted somebody to do something about it.
And the people that I was working with, this is so interesting when you think about structure.
We had on the West Coast, we had Washington State Council of Firefighters, Ricky Walsh,
and I were talking, you know, in it, I'd, Paul and I would be up in our log cabin in
the North Maine woods and Ricky and I had been talking in 2018 on this issue.
We had the PFFM who was advocating first in the nation to vote unanimously to act on this
issue in 2018.
What happened was, and Ed Kelly says it in burned, is I was upsetting the, I forgot how
he worded it, but some of the status quo.
Well, if you've done any research into this issue, the power of industry in the fire service
is incalculable because of the money that comes from the PPE industry, which is globally
$5 billion a year.
That's just PPE.
When you talk about American chemistry and 3M, I have no idea how you could even calculate
that.
There was a blueprint set up long before I came on the scene.
However, I think that I did a fairly good job of connecting the dots, albeit very snarky
and often with flaming arrows.
I had started writing a medium blog where I would connect the dots.
Back in 2017, we had just learned about a document that was produced by the AFFF manufacturers
that they knew that your AFFF was persistent, bioaccumulative, and toxic.
There was an article put out by Kyle Bagenstone of the Inquirer where he posted or produced
a document saying that this is a death sentence.
That document was discussed in a NFPA foam committee hearing.
The NFPA responded that that didn't take place at the NFPA or any of their meetings.
It certainly did.
Those people were gathered together for an NFPA technical committee or foam committee
meeting.
They all spoke privately out of committee.
You see the kind of bullshit lines that are produced by institutions.
What happened with the point I'm getting to is that that never reached the boots on the
ground.
The only people that knew it was a death sentence were the people that are in that committee.
Well, in that committee was Angus Foam and 3M and the big producers.
In 2017, when I saw that, I wrote a letter, very scathing letter, to the NFPA's Jim Pauley,
the CEO.
The CEO of NFPA makes $800,000 a year and the NFPA has $3.5 million in assets.
This is a non-governmental organization who just opened up a four-business side business
called NFPA Global Solutions.
Jim Pauley told us not to worry about that because the NFPA is a 501c3 with no conflicts
of interest.
However, what happened was that the response that I got from Chris Dubay and from the speakers
for the NFPA was that they are a neutral organization.
So 2017, I was kind of a wild child, wild cat, not knowing these institutions.
I'm not an educated person.
I don't have a lot of world experience, if you will.
So I'm thinking, okay, they're a neutral organization.
I get it.
Then I'm starting to peel back the layers.
I'm like, well, why didn't that ever get to the fleet?
For that, you'd have to go back to 3M themselves because there's a book by Neil McKay about
3M and the history of 3M.
I think he produced it in 1990.
Chapter 18 of that book tells us that when they had the fluorochemical division for your
light water, they had to infiltrate every fire department.
There's only one way to do that.
You need a vessel to do that.
That's the NFPA because every purchase order written for your turnout gear or for your
AFFF, Class A, Class B, or protein foam, what have you, every city or state is going to
say that it has to meet or exceed NFPA standards for A, B, or C.
At any event, I began putting these pieces together.
The pushback regarding the turnout gear came from two parties, primarily industry itself.
We saw that in 2018 after the real cancer in your gear article came out from Station
Pride, Afra and John Maher.
In 2018, Rapalat wrote a 195 page firefighter letter threatening to sue the government if
they didn't produce health studies for firefighters.
When the government finally did start to produce health studies, they excluded firefighters
because you were occupationally exposed to those chemicals.
He wrote another 48 page letter of protest.
In those early days, we had Rapalat, Dr. Peasley, Last Call Foundation, and firefighters across
the nation were working in their lanes to investigate this.
Let's go back to you falling head over heels in love with your husband.
We'll walk forward, obviously, why this even got on your radar in the first place and then
we'll unpack some of the resistance and then solutions as well because that's the whole
point of this is what next.
You're 16 years old, you're seeing stars.
Walk me through the beginning of your relationship and then Paul's entrance into the fire service.
I didn't know Paul in high school, but we went to the same high school.
One night I was driving, it was 1976, and I was driving on the highway with my girlfriend
and up next to us pulls up this baby blue Cadillac with this white roof.
I turn my head and I see this beautiful man smiling at me from ear to ear.
I literally saw stars.
There's absolutely no denying that.
That literally happened.
He motioned for my girlfriend and I to follow him and we did.
Then he motioned for me to come over into his caddy, come to find out it was his dad's
caddy because he was 17.
You've never been educated on stranger danger up to this point.
My father was slightly connected.
I'll just say that so I wasn't too afraid to much in the city of Worcester.
He motions for me to come sit in the car with him, but he's got a group, he's got about
five guys in the car with him and he turns around and says to everyone, everybody out
of the car now.
That just won me over.
I just thought that was so bad.
That's who Paul was.
Paul for years was that bad ass firefighter, that bigger than life firefighter.
He was, they would call Paul, Paul Cotter in the rescue.
He was known for his physical strength.
We just lived for the antics and the stories of the rescues and the stories of the antics
every day.
I have no problem telling you that the fire department, the fire service, the job was
the love of his life.
I had no problem sharing the love of his life with him.
My children loved it.
We'd hear Paul's diesel truck pull up after work and wait for him to come in smelling
like smoke because they have a lot of structure fires in the city.
We'd hear his slamming size 13 boots coming up the steps to let us know he was home.
Then we'd say how was the day and he'd tell us about the rescues and tell us about the
shenanigans that went on in the firehouse, which were, as you know, wild and ridiculous.
When did he enter the fire service?
What year?
1988.
Our daughter was 16 months old and our son was two months old.
What about the environment then?
I'm assuming by that point, packs were probably starting to be worn.
They were.
Yeah, yeah.
They were.
I think he remembers when they wore rubber coats.
I think I've heard him say he remembers when they wore rubber coats.
Yeah, that was one of the things we were always certain of is that Paul always wore his SCBA,
always wore that.
He was very diligent about educating himself and educating others.
He liked to be that guy that liked to train, lived for training, loved learning.
He was very involved in his union, served on the executive board, went to every union
meeting, proudly serves on their ramp gang where they build wheelchair ramps for those
in need, not just fire families, but for any family.
Serves proudly on his funeral details.
You'll always to this day see Paul at a funeral detail.
He serves on that proudly, very proudly.
Yeah.
He lived for those moments and he lived for working out.
I love to tell this story.
It's a safe story.
I can tell it.
You can tell a safe story on here too.
You're fine.
Oh, good.
He was very well known for working out.
He's a big, big, big guy, big bodybuilder, heavy lifter.
He likes to do heavy lifting.
He'd get on the loud speaker and yell, okay, everybody in the weight room now, we're going
to lift like men.
His voice was loud and booming.
When certain people came into the firehouse, he'd have no problem doing imitations.
He just lived for that or playing tricks on the general public.
I think I shared some details that they used to do back in the day where they had a potato
gun and they would fire out the back of the firehouse out at vacant buildings to maybe
get some potatoes in those abandoned buildings.
Just firehouse shenanigans.
That's so important and that's what's so sad.
When I saw, especially when COVID happened and all these stations were being divided
and no one was allowed to sit together.
Then you've got obviously the devices that are pulling people apart, the individual dorms
which in themselves are imperative, I think.
You have to make sure you're deliberately in the communal space because all the firehouse
antics, all the meals around the kitchen table, that was the kind of, I don't know what the
right term is, but that was really our decompression.
It's not the official one.
It is.
You've got your mental health counseling and all that stuff.
If you look at true positive mental health outlets, its conversation, its play and its
exercise.
We knew that as a fire wife.
I understood that and I loved that because it was so important as a fire wife that he
decompressed whatever happened during that time period.
I couldn't do that for him.
I wasn't one of the comrades at the job.
I didn't share that space with him.
Sure, we could both talk about work, but it's not the same if you're not decompressing that
in your space.
You come home from a call or come back from a call to the firehouse and it was a bad call.
I can't understand that when he comes home.
That needs to be unraveled at your firehouse table.
Absolutely.
Well, speaking of significant events and grief and trauma, obviously, sadly, Worcester is
known as the cold storage warehouse fire, the Worcester Six.
That clearly is within his career span.
Was he present on that fire?
Even if he wasn't, what was the impact of that on him and his department?
Paul was scheduled to work that night.
Three weeks prior, a ceiling from a restaurant fire fell down on him and he was injured.
Another firefighter filled in for him and on that evening shift, two firefighters were
called in.
So there were two replacements called in.
Well, Paul was on the rescue.
So his replacement was an engine guy.
And then apparently, the other party that was not in that evening was a rescue guy.
So the other firefighter that took his place that night on the rescue was Jerry Lucy.
And Jerry Lucy is the cousin of Dennis Leary, you know, birthed the Leary Firefighter Foundation.
Dennis is a big supporter of the work that we do, Leary Firefighter Foundation as well.
So Paul became a liaison for one of the families and that liaison work went on for such a long
time that it truly damaged our marriage because he became...
It was such proud work.
I'm careful about how I say this, but being a liaison is such honorable work.
Weeks turned into months, turned into a year, turned into a year plus months.
And one day I had finally had enough.
He was missing family occasions for events, et cetera.
And I had to say, if you walk out that door, the kids and I won't be here when you come
back.
And that second, he picked up his phone and he called our 1009 President, Frank Rafa,
literally one of the best union presidents ever.
And he said, Frank, I'm out.
Find someone else.
It happened in an instant.
And we had to heal from that.
We had to heal from that.
With all the things that I've talked about, obviously, once in a while people reach out
and I want to try and be there for them, but there is an element of that balance between
being there for everyone else and still being there for your family.
When you look back now at Paul, was there an element of almost survivor's guilt that
he was trying to do more and more and more with these other families?
Oh, 100%.
100%.
Because I know when that call came to me, when he told me it hadn't been made public
yet, but the firefighters knew.
But the firefighters knew.
And he called me, I was driving home or driving somewhere in Central Mass.
And his voice was choking.
And he said, Diane, we've lost six, six.
And I asked who, because obviously we were going to know each and every one.
And he told me two names at that moment.
And yeah, it was brutal because one of them I had known since I was 14.
We're going on to a successful rescue to kind of on the other side of what we do and the
outcomes in Burned, you feature one of the rescues that he was in the paper for.
So talk to me about that because looking at the picture in the paper of what was left
of the building at the end, that looks like an absolute worst case scenario rescue to
me.
Oh, as I said, the city of Three Deckers and they're packed so closely together.
And again, he was with his guys that he just lived for.
And that, I think Burned does a great job of saying exactly what happened during that,
I think it was a Three Alarm fire.
Not like every fire wife.
He went to work, I think it was 4.30, which meant that he'd probably leave the house at
three o'clock just to get to the firehouse early in the day and do what he likes to do
there and whatnot.
And we'd say goodbye.
And since December 3rd, I had always given him that kiss and we always locked eyes just
in case it was without a word spoken in case it was the last one.
I think that's not unique to spouses, significant others of firefighters.
And that the kids were very young still then and it was such a roaring fire that when he
came home, you could smell the smoke on him.
It was such a roaring fire.
And he told me about the rescue.
And I don't think I saw the pictures right away, but the pictures that I saw were in
color so we could see this man's body and how badly he was burned.
And my mind goes right to my husband and what does that do to him to see a body in that
condition.
But it was a great success story because that man survived that fire.
And there are great winds when the winds are good.
And it makes you want to do more of that type of work.
But the conditions I think were very hostile.
I think Paul speaks of doors that were barricaded and that's why the strength is so important
when it comes to fighting the fire but then also the mental strength after to deal with
the after effects of the fire.
The rescue responded to a lot of structural fires and we were always jaded in the fact
that everything was going to be okay in my mind because Paul was so strong.
There is a fabulous story about them responding to an elevator call in Worcester, one of our
banking buildings on Main Street.
He and the guys from Rescue One responded to an elevator call where there's a man stuck
in an elevator shaft.
Literally he was dangling by his feet.
That's all they could see were his feet when they came up to the elevator and they had
to MacGyver ways to undo this mechanism that was trapping him by the ankles.
One of the ways they had to MacGyver was to go down to the previous floor to put some
wood in to prop up the elevator, some part of the elevator.
That would mean that Paul would hold one man by one hand as he swung free in three stories
or 11 stories, I don't know how, but the guy looks up in Paul and says, don't let me go.
Paul says, yeah, not going anywhere.
True Paul Carter fashion and that's who he was.
What about the work schedule back then?
Was he working 24 48s?
Was it a four platoon system?
It was two and four.
Is that how you say it, James?
I forget.
So he'd work two days, two days, then he'd have one day off and then work two nights.
Okay.
So it was like 10s and 14s or 12s.
I don't know what that means.
How many hours was the day and how many hours was the night?
The days were 10 hours and the nights were 12 hours.
Okay, brilliant.
Yeah, because I mean, that's obviously another element.
You've got obviously all the exposures, you've got the shift work and then obviously we're
going to get into the PFAS deeply now as well.
So then walk me through to 2014.
I mean, he's had this incredible firefighting career.
We've had tragedy, we've had success and heroic rescues.
As we progress through our profession, we start to feel somewhat invincible.
And I mean that in a good way.
You've made it one year, five years, 10 years, 15 years.
But it's that other killer that a lot of us are kind of pushing to the back of our mind.
So talk to me about the discovery in 2014 and then let's walk through the, I guess,
the PFAS journey for lack of a better word.
So when Paul was going in for an eye exam and it was found that he had cataracts and
he was 55 years old.
At 55 he had a cataract and part of that meant that he had to get some blood work done and
that he went to the lab, got the blood work done and his nurse practitioner called him
and said, Paul, your PSA is up by a hair.
And she said, I don't like this.
I, you know, I've been testing you for years and I've never seen this and I want you to
get a biopsy.
So he did go for the biopsy, which was rough, but it was the only way to know for certain.
And he wanted me to come with him that day to get the results of the biopsy.
And I thought, you know, as a wife, that's exactly what I'm going to do.
I wouldn't not do that.
But I was, I was busy that day.
I wanted to get my grocery shopping done and I had things I had to do myself.
And I remember feeling a little bit, let's hurry up and get this over with because you
are literally Superman and there's going to be nothing wrong with you.
And we walked into the office, the doctor comes into the, you know, the little area
where you are in the private room, where the exam room is.
The doctor is talking to Paul, like, you know, tell him about that, his golf game or something
like that.
And I'm thinking, excellent, you know, hurry up and get us out of here.
Out of the blue, he literally says, yeah, well, let's cancel.
Paul, every pore in his body opened up and beads of sweat came pouring out.
I remember he had a T-shirt, white T-shirt on and I forgot a pullover, maybe polo shirt.
He peeled that off of him and he sank into the chair and I'm screaming, oh God, no, no,
no, no, no.
Because when you get that diagnosis in the fire service, you are already surmising what
that means.
You lived through it because your firehouse has had many cancers, young, old.
The young cancers you're probably thinking might be in something in their family.
The old cancers were thinking, well, they probably didn't have, you know, SCBA and in
the 70s, a lot of these guys were smoking cigarettes and all of that.
So your mind goes to fix it immediately.
The doctor spoke for 45 minutes and we didn't hear a word.
Our son was leaving for the Marines and, you know, just weeks.
We had a big Christmas event coming up every year.
We had, you know, 100 people at our house for open house, 100 firefighters.
It's always a big firefighter, a neighborhood bash.
And he went dark.
He couldn't tell his brothers.
He couldn't tell the people he worked with.
He couldn't process it.
He couldn't tell our children.
He called his brother Rob and said, I've got a touch of cancer.
A touch of cancer.
Yeah.
And then began the search for the physician.
He had robotic surgery, St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Boston.
Great surgeon that did his surgery.
And it was successful in that they removed the entire prostate, unsuccessful in that
there were not clear margins, which I had no idea what that means.
But his concern with Paul is that he was a Gleason 7 on a score of 1 to 10, considered
aggressive with no symptoms, no family history.
He suffered from what we now talk about, although we still don't like talking about it because
it's so uncomfortable.
When you get prostate cancer, you're going to be told the outcome if you survive the
prostate cancer.
There's likely erectile dysfunction.
There's likely incontinence.
And there can be other hormonal issues, I think.
And that's affected us.
That's affected us.
With Paul, stress and incontinence became a major issue because there is something,
I don't know what it is, but it severed completely.
And if that doesn't heal completely, you can't control yourself as you can do if you're
fully intact.
When we began to see the devastating effects of that, he knew it would be impossible to
go back to the job.
Then he had to fight for the pension.
And that was horrific because he was told, well, you no longer have cancer.
You can do the job.
And before the parac board, he said to everyone that day, he said, listen, you're all here
wearing your suits and ties.
I'm here wearing a long shirt with tails because I pissed myself.
When he told me that, I was so furious, James.
I wanted to kill everyone on that board for making him do that, making him say that.
I felt, how dare you do that to my man?
How dare you put him through that?
How many years did he had on by this point?
It was almost 27, just going on 28.
27 years of service.
And they're still questioning the pension.
I mean, that just underlines.
I've heard, I'm sure you have too.
So many people have told me how even in states that have the cancer presumption that these
companies are fighting them and they've heard people have said they have actually heard
with their own ears, the representatives from these insurance companies say, well, we'll
just keep fighting them till they die.
So we don't have to pay them.
Disgusting.
And his cancer in mass is presumptive.
Yeah.
And that went on.
He did win his pension.
Thank God.
He did win the pension.
And then he began, you know, Paul Weir's a high and tight, kept himself physically fit
all the time.
At 47 years old, he was boxing in a Worcester police versus Worcester fire boxing match
that benefited.
They called the gang unit and they.
Just a little side story here, but I guess when the original cops saw Paul, he backed
out of the boxing.
That's not how it works.
You can't decide you don't want to fight him when you see him.
That's what happened.
That's the God's honest truth.
And then they put in a CEO that boxes regularly and Paul got his bell rung.
But it was for the right cause.
So that was a big, big day for us.
But if you take a look at that picture, that's just, you know, five, six, seven years before.
And that's pretty much what Paul looked like prior to the condition ending the career.
So he had a big, beautiful family room that Paul and his guys had built for us back in
Paxton, Mass and our house overlooked a beautiful pond, big fireplace and big reclining chair.
And Paul wouldn't get out of that reclining chair.
And the beard grew.
The hair grew.
And he'd sit in that reclining chair looking at the walls and looking at TV.
And he had a catheter.
He had a catheter for a very, very long time.
There was some nerve damage to his thigh.
And he let himself go.
You know, wasn't taking a shower and I didn't recognize him anymore.
And that's what propelled me to start researching fire fight of cancer.
And why was this happening to my husband, to my Superman, my Hercules?
And I came across an article from, I think it was maybe from 2004 about a New Jersey
firefighter.
His name was James Heenan, I believe.
Heenan or Keenan.
And he had succumbed to steam burns throughout his body because his gear degraded.
So I didn't know what that word meant, degraded.
But I thought to myself, is that what happened to Paul?
Did the gear degrade in the groin?
Is that why that toxic smoke got in there?
I flew down the basement steps, pulled his gear out of the box that had been packed and
stored away in because it was too hard to look at anymore.
And I took his rescue flashlight and started shining it.
And I started to see these coin-sized pieces of fabric missing inside the gear in the groin
area.
And I flew back upstairs and started looking at what's the gear made out of Kevlar, Nomex,
looking at everything Kevlar, Nomex.
And I'd find all the fire engineering magazines and, you know, DuPont.
It's what's inside that counts.
You know, going through all of the resources to find out what's DuPont, what's Kevlar,
all of that.
And I then came across this 1999 safety alert issued by the general president then was L.
L. Whitehead, I want to say.
Is that right?
I think I hope that's his first name.
I know the last name was Whitehead of 1999.
And they issued a safety alert because a brief text moisture barrier was degrading and was
failing.
So the IAFF was threatening to sue the manufacturers.
And the manufacturers were pushing back and saying, no, no, there's nothing wrong here
and we're not going to recall this.
That opened the rabbit hole because I said, why are manufacturers fighting with the IAFF?
What the hell?
So I started to ask around, you know, is this something that could have caused Paul's degradation
of his gear?
And I started to reach out to environmentalists, et cetera.
One of the parties that I reached out to was Erin Brockovich.
And she replied and she said, I've gotten your emails.
Then we had a phone conversation.
And she said, Diane, does the gear itself have PFOA or PFOS?
And I said, oh, I'd never heard of those.
And sure enough, I got off the phone and I could find out literally in a minute.
I googled PFOS, PPE, and up pops the European Chemical Agency is already looking into a
potential transition to non-PFOA PPE.
I'm like, oh, God, they've got this stuff in their gear.
So I start asking around, well, our stuff, our gear can't have that because we're the
United States of America.
That would not happen here.
I'm certain of it.
Lo and behold, I couldn't get an answer.
I started emailing the manufacturers.
They start saying, if we do not use PFOA or PFOS in turnout gear, if it is there, it is
as a byproduct of manufacturing.
What the hell does that mean?
That's when I started to harass Rob Belat.
Well, let's talk about who Rob is and then how that conversation was because he was on
the show.
I forget the episode number.
I'll look it up in a second.
But my goodness, when you hear, again, you talk about someone who's a disruptor who won't
take no for an answer.
Rob is another one just like yourself.
There's absolute pit bull when it comes to making sure an issue is put out to the public's
knowledge.
Rob did not even come up for air when he took us on.
When Rob, I emailed Rob maybe 160 times and he responded with one word once.
Fascinating, he says.
Fascinating.
I then see, I'm thinking, Rob's already done his big work.
Oh, no, he didn't even come up for air when he took this on.
He and I collaborated with Congressman McGovern in Massachusetts and Congressman McGovern helped
form the Congressional PFAS Task Force that was working in this lane.
But Rob was the only fighter that we had publicly in this issue that would speak as to the concerns
of this issue until we got Graham as well.
Graham Pesley.
Rob was interviewed by one of the Cincinnati papers and he was called an ambulance chaser.
I think that was Lion Gear that called him an ambulance chaser.
And Rob fired back and he said something to the effect of trace amounts.
No one's ever identified what is a safe volume of a known carcinogen.
And it just got worse from there.
It just got worse from there.
But he took.
And just to interject, so Rob Bellart was the lawyer, if people listening have seen the
film Dark Waters.
So he's the one that took on DuPont.
And there's a documentary and there's a kind of dramatized version of this.
But again, complete pushback, complete labeling of whistleblower and all these other elements.
And then ultimately he was the one that was pulling this out of the shadows and making
people realize, no, this chemical company is not only poisoning the local town next
to it, but the trace elements of PFAS are being found literally around the globe.
I forget how they stated, but there's like one small tribe in the middle of nowhere that
hasn't got PFAS.
The rest of us have already got it in our bodies.
Our allies, environmental working group, Ken Cook, they produced a firefighter timeline
of PFAS.
And I think you really have to look at those documents there.
I was able to help work on that with them.
And they've been our greatest environmental asset in this issue.
They really put together the AFFF and the turnout gear, the patents, et cetera, the
firefighters.
So Rob and I began collaborating with many others.
I think in those days I tried to work very non-publicly that I was working very closely
with Rob on this issue.
Rob was organizing efforts for studies for us, networking to get firefighters put into
places where we needed to get blood work done.
And then you saw in 2018 that Rob filed the first nationwide lawsuit for every man, woman,
and child in the USA with Fire Chief Kevin Hardwick of Ohio.
So I can't state the significance that Rob has put forth in this.
And Rob's been by my side, our side for years.
He too has seen what transformed within the fight within the union and the positioning
of the union and the allegiances as well in the Sheikh Bargara.
Well, you talked about Europe already identifying this and starting to get rid of it in their
gear.
This is the thing, I think there's an element of arrogance in the fire service and even
nationally.
We beat our chests and say we're the greatest country in the world.
And I'm a very proud member of the United States.
And the reason why I do this is to make everything better.
That's the whole point.
But that being said, you've got to challenge fairy tales.
And to say you're the greatest country in the world when you have 70% of your nation
obese or overweight and a mental health crisis and all the other things, homelessness and
gangs, there's clearly some room for improvement and that takes humility.
In the fire service, what I've seen is there's this kind of also narcissistic arrogance.
We'll take for example, the sacrificial lamb, what is the leather helmet.
You've got a giant sponge sitting on your head that's absorbing all the carcinogens
and or your radio strap, which you're then going to wear an EMS calls right against your
skin.
And then you'll turn around to make fun of the European firefighters because their helmet
looks like a spaceman.
So at this point, you're not concerned about performance and safety.
You're concerned about how you look.
You want to be Kurt Russell.
So separating those two and realizing that some of these other nations, Sweden, for example,
are ahead of the game because they've already figured some of these things out rather than
ridiculing them, asking yourself, well, why aren't we doing it this way?
Doesn't mean you have to do everything that way.
You don't have to do the full clean cab model if you don't want to, for example, but not
sitting in a cab with your gear and the pack off gassing while you're driving home.
That's just common sense.
So talk to me about what you were learning that was happening in Europe and then the
resistance to this conversation you were finding here in America.
In Europe, they had produced something called the PFOA background document.
It's three hundred and eighty five pages.
I can't tell you how many times I've read that cover to cover.
And I would produce that I would put links on my computer and I'd send that email to
hundreds of organizations, firefighters, institutions, journalists, our gear.
Their gear has this and they're already trying to remove it.
And then we reach out to the scientists in Europe who were very, very aware of what was
going on in discussions here about trying to squash this discussion in the US, a because
we had Dr. Roger Klein of Cambridge University.
Brilliant, brilliant man.
And he had produced a paper for Hemingfire, I think it is in the UK on this subject.
It's still available by download.
You may even be able to find it on my website.
TurnoutGear and PFOA.com.
So I was finding that and sending that to fire service leaders.
It wasn't just the IAFF.
It was the IAFC, the National Volunteer Fire Council and of course, the NFPA pleading with
someone to please, please take this on.
It doesn't belong in my hands.
I was emailing newspaper reporters.
Please get somebody to do something about this.
Congressional pleading with someone because you needed someone that had hours to research,
had hours to connect the dots.
And that's what I was doing.
I was connecting the dots.
And when I was trying to network and get people to not so much believe what the IAFF was saying
because the IAFF was coming out with statements that they spoke to DuPont and DuPont said
all is well.
And that was in 2017, 2018.
And then in 2019, we had the Lion Gear study that DuPont that, excuse me, that Harold
Schaeferger endorsed.
And that's the kind of pushback that we were facing even in great discussions about health
and safety at Health Cancer Summit.
You saw the industry capture of your Cancer Summit.
You see the industry capture of your institutions, not just fire service institutions, but the
EPA.
All of these institutions back to the 70s were captured by DuPont.
You had Susan Stelnacker, who was a vice president of DuPont, pleading with the EPA to not put
PFOA in a Prop 65 guidance.
So Prop 65 is your label that discusses reproductive harms.
You see that on all of your...
So you don't get to see a Prop 65 label or any labels, any health labels in your turnout
gear.
And I was putting all these pieces together.
The money that was being produced in the form of perks and incentives by turnout gear, manufacturers,
trips, awards, it's all very enticing.
It's all very enticing to the degree that we could probably look the other way and not
believe this crazy bitch.
And that's what happened.
Well, I mean, it's going to say when you look at studies or if you look at organizations
that are supposed to be trustworthy, I'll give you a recent one, the FDA just rejected
the use of MDMA for psychotherapy, which has shown such incredible efficacy.
Now, that's just the same FDA that approved the use of Oxycontin, which really is the
underbelly of the opioid crisis that we're suffering now.
Same agency.
And then you look at how we were told hands down categorically that the COVID-19 was
100% effective.
And if you didn't take it, you were a murderer.
And if you look at studies that show that fast food doesn't make you sick, that cigarettes
are perfectly safe.
This is what kills me, and actually just releasing today a researcher who did a study on the
shift schedule, the 4896 being healthier than the 2448.
And we had a great conversation as not putting blame on him because he was new to this entire
field.
But that department that he studied ran, and I'm using his words now, less than one call
a night.
So you've got all these departments around the country now that are going, oh, I saw
the research in the 4896 is healthier.
What is Worcester, Boston, Dallas, Ocala, wherever it is in the country, most of us
are running multiple times at night.
So you can't say that 48 hours in a row without sleep is safe.
But this is a problem with studies.
All someone has to do is front load a study so it benefits them and then hold it as the
gold standard.
And it takes a lot of diligence and a lot of aggression and swimming upstream, as it
were, to get everyone to just take a step back and realize that that study doesn't
mean anything on its own, especially if it was subsidized or paid for by an organization
that's going to benefit from its results.
That's what we had.
That's exactly what we had.
So in the Lion Gear study, we call it the volleyball tennis ball episode because they
were literally their exact words to our PPE specialist, Jeff Kenobi from Alameda County
fire.
He's the reason why we literally have the study with Dr. Peasley.
If it weren't for Jeff, we would not have this study, I can assure you of that because
of the lengths that he went to.
That's a story for him to tell.
When he was he wanted to see this study by Lion Gear that they produced.
Lion Gear flew from Dayton, Ohio to Alameda County, California to Jeff's PPE laboratory.
And during that time, Jeff, the Lion Gear team received a call from a third party.
That third party was Paul Krastowski.
So Paul Krastowski was the consultant that led this study.
Krastowski said to Jeff, Jeff, don't worry about these chemicals, the new chemicals.
They're too big to pass through the skin.
They're like volleyballs and tennis balls.
Fast forward a few months at the IAFFs, it was one of the health summits.
Oh boy, we see them saying the same thing.
I think it was Raquel Segal that said you don't have to worry about the PFAS in your
gear because it's like volleyballs and tennis balls.
I'm sitting right here at this desk.
My phone rings.
It's Jeff.
I literally fall off the floor.
We're both screaming.
Did you just hear that?
Oh, I can't tell you how many flaming arrows were fired that day because we're both banging
on to the comments section.
And oh my God, it was wild, wild.
You know, that's the influence of industry is so pervasive.
And I'll tell you, James, industry gives zero shits about your job.
They're going to entice you to do their thing.
I wrote an article called The Scheme in Medium and it starts out with the story about a FDNY
firefighter.
I think he was an officer and he was taking some funds off the side by lying gear.
And, you know, he paid the price for that.
They give zero, you know what, about your job.
Their job is to entice you.
And I believe that is what happened with the Schaeftberger administration.
Not all, of course, not all.
And I believe that Schaeftberger was heavily influenced with perks and incentives.
Well this is the problem and I literally just shared an amazing speech and I forget the
gentleman's name now, but Tulsi Gabbard actually shared it originally who I had on the show
as well.
And we discussed this very thing.
If you have an industry that makes money off the illness of Americans, where is the resistance
to or where is the incentive to make people healthy?
If you have multiple companies that are making huge amount of money from weapons and uniforms
and MREs, where is the resistance to war?
And it's the same, you know, politicians are politicians.
This is why it's so careful.
You know, it's so slippery when you're in, you know, a union where you stay connected
to your people because I can tell you, where I used to work, Reedy Creek, they were hosting
the union, the IAFF conference, whatever it's called, I never really paid that much attention.
And it was literally like Britney Spears was coming.
The demands that they had, they had to have this kind of suite and I'm like, was it blue
M&Ms?
I mean, what are we talking about here?
This is a firefighter.
It's all you are.
You're a firefighter that is paid by us to represent us.
And you could see the massive disconnect.
So at that point, when you've got any and burned, they show them thanking the sponsors
and one of the sponsors is DuPont.
So at this point, you know, where are the checks and balances to make sure that the
people who are supposed to be advocating for our health are actually holding their ethics
up?
And I would argue even the same in administrations.
I know a lot of a lot of chiefs that are absolute fucking cowards because they're more worried
about their own career ladder than they are advocating for the people and then local union
leaders too.
And I know some amazing ones, don't get me wrong, but I see it that corruption, that
self-serving element that's a cancer in the fire service.
Oh, it's the biggest.
It's absolutely the biggest.
You know, this, we saw it and I can tell you that what I've put out there is just a fraction
of the information that I've acquired over the years.
You're going to see that in the memoir because I don't think we're going to get the congressional
hearings that we should have gotten on this.
When Ed Kelly asked for the Schneider report to be made public for you all, that's what
I was waiting for was to see in my eyes in black and white what the outcome was of the
investigation that the ethics committee of the IAFF had requested by that law firm Schneider
regarding their relationship with vendors.
I already know and I have their receipts.
The executive board voted 50-50 and this is from President Kelly himself to 50% voted
not to release, 50% or eight and eight voted to release it, not to release it.
He cast the deciding vote that was to release it to the public.
And then I believe he states that the legal team has advised not to release it.
That speaks so loudly to me because I know what I lived for years.
I know the information that I have been entrusted with regarding these channels and that is
why it is so important that the transparency be given and that investigations are undertaken
into this issue.
It perplexes me why we are not holding investigations, congressional investigations into what clearly
is going to be the largest intentional occupational poisoning known to mankind.
You have 30 years of this, 30 years of this poisoning.
Paul and I have always said we are not saying that everyone's cancer is from PFAS but when
you look at the cancers related to PFAS, they match line item by line item the known cancers
that are firefighters, highest level, testicular, blood cancers, brain cancers, prostate cancer,
those all match the PFAS cancers.
And industry will come out and say, well, who the hell is she?
She's just some thiamin's wife.
Talk to me about all the things because I think this is the entire conversation and
when COVID happened, everyone was focused on this microorganism that was floating around
and there was obviously a real virus out there that was then opportunistically making some
sick and taking many, many lives and it was devastating.
But what wasn't happening simultaneously was the conversation about making Americans healthier
physically, mentally, and at the end of this, and I've said this many times, if it was really
about health, PE programs would have been bolstered, local farmers would have been incentivized
to grow local organic food, all the fast food would have been taken out of schools and the
soda machines, downtown areas would have been more pedestrianized.
We would have actually taken it seriously.
And the thing with the PFAS is, like you said, of course, the carcinogens in these fires
are and car fires and dumpster fires are something that we absolutely have to take into consideration
and be extremely careful about.
The diesel exhaust, having your gear in the bay, having the ice maker in the bay, these
are clearly things that we need to fix.
The resilience of the human being to these carcinogens, which is where the fight that
I'm so dogmatic about is rest and recovery and our first responders fully staffing a
fire department.
So the mandatory overtime goes away.
Massive part of this conversation.
But then to have clean gear that is also carcinogenic is another huge part of this conversation.
The cancer conversation is a pie chart and PFAS is a big piece as well.
So talk to me about the gamut of diseases that are being related to this, not just in
the individual, but in the offspring of the individual.
So I think this is some people not so worried about what happens to them.
But when you know that you're passing it to your children, then people pay attention.
Well, that's the crux of this.
I think James is because you were taught to mitigate against toxic smoke, against diesel,
against, you know, bringing your gear in your home, not washing it in your family's washing
machine.
You were never taught to mitigate against the known carcinogen and family of carcinogens
that your gear is saturated in as a durable water repellent from head to head to ankle,
from neck to ankle, and then a full Teflon moisture barrier.
So I can only relay what I read and I have no credentials to offer you what I can tell
you from years of this lane is that the reproductive, both male and female, the reproductive systems
are impacted, affected by PFAS.
There's a brilliant firefighter in Chesapeake, Virginia, Lieutenant Brian Goodman, and he
operates an organization called ESSHA, Esha.
So Brian found out that he has zero sperm and he's been elevating that information as
he and his wife, you know, try to have a family.
We also know that that PFAS changes sperm.
PFAS mutates prostate genes.
PFAS loves blood, so it doesn't lay in the fat as much as it goes right into your organs,
your blood, and then it's recycled throughout every heartbeat in your blood system.
Mick Tisbury, Commander Mick Tisbury from Melbourne Fire Brigade, he coordinated a
brilliant study two years ago that was just published this year, I believe, regarding
blood drawdowns.
So the only way that firefighters can get this out of your blood, out of your system
is to give blood.
Part of what he wanted was for that blood to not be put into blood banks for use, but
more so for blood study and for other ways that it can help the medical field.
But that's the only way that that can be drawn out of you.
And Dr. Peasley states that there is a brain cancer that only, I think he gave the odds
of one in four million people get it.
He said, how come I know three firefighters with the same brain cancer?
So I know when the science community saw the numbers in the study, they were stunned at
how high the numbers of these PFAS chemicals are in our Last Call Foundation and Notre
Dame study, because their replacement chemical is the C6 chemistry.
It's also one of the other PFAS, so replacement is PFBS.
And that is astronomical in number in your turnout gear, astronomical in number.
I had a conversation with one scientist who said, Diane, when I saw that, I literally
cried because those numbers are just so high, so high.
When I was watching Byrne's documentary, there's a scene, I think it's one of the other firefighters
that was talking about two of his friends he'd already buried in their thirties.
But the audience, and if you notice, they're all wearing masks.
One has got the dust mask from Lowe's, another one's got a little cloth mask that could have
been made from a piece of t-shirt material.
And so this was the problem with the mismanaging or the misinformation or the downright lying
during COVID was, oh, no, this mask will be fine.
You understand microorganisms, you know how small a flu virus is and what it can permeate.
In the fire service, the levels of fit testing we have to do for our N95 for a single use
versus grandma's knitted mask that you were seeing while someone was mask shaming someone
else.
So that being said, going back to the volleyball and tennis ball comment, talk to me about
the actual permeability of these PFAS family molecules.
So again, not scientist here can only tell you what I've garnered over the years.
There is a brand new study out this year.
I don't know the name of the science team, but I did post it on my website.
You'll see it there.
And it is about dermal absorption.
So I'll first go back to July of 1980 and Rob Bellot produced a document on page 174
of his book, Exposure.
By discovery, he found that DuPont knew that PFOA would permeate all protective equipment
eventually.
So those workers had to wear masks and protective equipment.
You all never got that message.
By design, telling you right now, that's by design.
And in prior to the new C6 and safer PFAS, although Dr. Linda Birnbaum said they all
are toxic.
She was the head of National Institute for Health for 30 years.
Prior to the C6 chemistry, you had C8, C9, C10, and maybe C11.
I'm not sure.
When I did the first communication with Dr. Peasley in 2017 where he tested a set of new
never worn turnout gear circa 2004 that I purchased and sent him samples.
And he wrote back that email that said, these C8 and higher chemicals are more dangerous
than the newer replacement chemicals.
So they're more dangerous, they're more deadly.
But that's what you all wore for all those years up until industry thought it could bamboozle
you by telling you, as Millikan did in 2018, I think they produced a shots fired paper,
or a white paper, and that was telling us the new chemistry that they use is 10 times
less toxic.
And you goddamn well better be happy about it.
Well, I've seen as well labels that say they did not contain PFAS.
And going back to my conversation with Rob Belot, which for people listening was episode
631, what started happening is the moment there was an uproar about one, all they did
was just change the molecule slightly, give it a completely name, and now you can say,
oh, yeah, there's no PFAS, because now this is PFAS or whatever the next acronym is.
Right.
You've got that in all of your, every single manufacturer that has debated or interjected
their opinion in this has produced documentation saying they do not use PFOA or PFOS.
What they don't tell you is they're using the replacement chemicals that some of the
chemicals, the precursors, I don't know what a precursor is.
I'm just repeating what the scientists are telling me, that the precursors are forming
PFOA in hours to days.
So they can technically say, we don't manufacture it, but we know it's there.
That's what has happened.
That's why it's so important that you purchase PFAS free gear that is trickling its way out
to you, that you become involved in the legislation, and that you listen to what President Kelly
is doing now.
He's got this.
He's working on the legislation to replace the gear.
Senator Cory Booker has introduced legislation that's going to help firefighters by taxing
or levying the gear manufacturers, firefighters like my husband who had cancer, and produce
a stipend for them, if you will.
They're going to do that by taxing the gear manufacturers.
I don't think in America that you should get to make tremendous profits and then pay no
penalty for the intentional poisoning of the American Fire Service.
That's literally happening right now.
Paul is one of the 20,000 firefighters that are suing the gear manufacturers for these
exact cancers that match the PFAS cancers that Rob and the C8 Science Panel found in
2000.
I forget if that was 2012 that they came out with their science panel study.
However, one of the aspects of that multi-district litigation is that prostate cancer is found
right now not to have enough science backing it that the judge in charge of the multi-district
litigation is comfortable enough to have prostate cancer in that group.
There's testicular cancer, kidney cancer, thyroid disease, ulcerative colitis, and I
know I'm missing one in there, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, I think it is.
But prostate cancer, although we know is so prevalent in the fire service, is waitlisted
for four years until causation can be determined.
What I've seen, this is obviously from a different lens, is some departments or organizations
jumping on this.
What worries me about that, if it's a singular conversation, is it's extremely easy to point
outwards to DuPont.
Now, that is exactly where the blame is and that's where we should be pointing.
But simultaneously, the conversation needs to be within the department too, especially
outside of the Northeast.
These departments that are working their people 56 hours a week, 80 hours a week with mandatory
overtime, we know that sleep deprivation is a known carcinogen.
I think that this conversation needs to also be parallel with the rest and recovery conversation,
which ironically, if you fix the things that are broken in the fire service, which is the
working environment at the moment, hence the recruitment crisis, now you actually free
up funds that ultimately will help whatever the outcome of this lawsuit in the meantime
help you buy new bunker gear that is safe for your people.
This is what I think needs to happen is the PFAS conversation, a thousand percent needs
to be out there.
But as a department, you've also got to look in the mirror and go, what else are we doing
that's contributing to these cancers?
It's very easy for you to just point your finger and do nothing yourself.
That's what we never wanted to do, James.
Paul and I have always been so careful to say that the reason why we're so vocal about
this is because you, meaning the gear industry, DuPont, Lion Gear and others, made it your
mission to withhold that information, to withhold it.
We've never said that all of these cancers are only from the PFAS and the turnout gear.
Firefighters are smart people.
When you talk about discussions and what is going on in your firehouse kitchen table,
you start talking about all of these things.
The administrators at that table, because you will have administrators at that table,
they start saying, oh shit, immediately.
I'll tell you two things that happened in Worcester, Massachusetts.
Karen Hensel broke this story to national news in Boston in September of 2018.
When we were filming in a Worcester firehouse about this issue, which we had cleared permission
with Paul's chief, Mike LaVoy at that time, and Paul had already retired by this time,
but we got permission from the chief.
Karen and her film crew come in from Boston and we're all set up.
The phone rings, in comes a firefighter, he's got a cell phone, Paul, it's the chief, and
Paul says, yes chief, yes chief, okay chief, I understand chief.
Hangs up the phone, we got to go, that was the chief.
He says, legal is nervous.
Legal is nervous.
Now we start working with Dr. Peasley.
Dr. Peasley meets us in a Boston firehouse one day.
He sees a dust collector in the firehouse.
Oh, I wonder if Emily Spirofine is collecting PFAS.
I say, I don't know, but I can ask her.
Sure enough, Emily is not collecting PFAS, but she wants to, and she is now communicating
with Dr. Peasley, and we have 16 Boston firehouses.
That was the groundbreaking study for the PFAS and dust.
Karen Hensel wanted to collect dust from Worcester firehouses to be included in that study.
Our chief, Mike LeVoy, told her no.
She wasn't getting his dust.
Yeah.
It goes back to why you're opposing something that's supposed to be helping the wellness
and performance of your people.
It will all come out.
Sunlight is going to shine on all of it, all of it, all of it.
Do the right thing.
I think at Jason Burns, you talked about Jason.
Oh my God.
Jason has a story to tell you.
It's not my story to tell.
But when Jason aligned himself so closely with me and was told not to, he paid a price
he is one of the most highly regarded firefighters that I know now in the nation.
See?
Well, this is even with what I did, and I didn't specifically leave just to have a bigger
voice.
My circumstances put me in a very complacent department that I just spent five years trying
to fix.
And it's funny, we were talking about activism before we hit record.
Yeah, whistleblower, which is such a negative term in the way it's used.
But ultimately, I realized once I did transition out, that that was when I could finally be
the voice for the fire service.
And again, it's not me, you know, monologuing, it's me interviewing other people, but asking
the questions that everyone needs asked in an environment where no one can tell you,
you can't say that, you know, HR called or whatever, there is no HR.
I'm HR for my business.
But it's so sad that when you're talking about these, and even just to kind of go to something
trivial, fitness standards, the opposition by administrations, by unions, to simply have
a standard that makes you perform at the right level as a firefighter and massively increases
your chance of a healthy retirement, that that is opposed in our profession is fucking
insanity.
So this again, was said earlier, this organizational betrayal, which I would argue is just cowardice.
People climb the rungs of the ladder, but they've got no business being up there because
they're not ready to actually walk the walk in that role.
Yeah, 100%.
100%.
We saw it at every turn of this, we saw great bravery.
We saw very creative thinkers of, you know, fire departments and, and local unions that
were working in this to, to even to do the right thing, even though they, they knew that,
you know, there was going to be discussions and phone calls, et cetera, et cetera, in
regards to how, you know, how, how close are you working with, with Carter, et cetera.
And that's what happened to Jason.
Again, it's his story to tell.
And I don't, I don't want to tell his story, but I know that Jason paid an early price
for aligning with Paul and I.
I think that Jason showed not only his brilliance, but his courage in that he will always do
the right thing, regardless of what anyone thinks his firefighters come first.
That's what he did with us.
Well, I want to get some closing questions, but just to round out before we do that, what
needs to change?
What are the things that you're pushing for?
I'm more than happy if you want to name companies that are already creating the gear that is
going to be safe for us.
So let's talk about the solutions now.
So the solutions now, we just passed great legislation in Massachusetts, as I told you
about earlier in our conversation, and that has to be replicated in every state.
You have to sundown that gear in every single state.
I would ask you to please follow General President Ed Kelly on this issue because the IAFF is
doing the work.
They are getting the work done.
They have a great page for you on the website, and there's legislation that your help is
needed on the support that your voices are needed for.
He's pushing for new generation gear.
Maybe you don't need to be in a fire for two hours.
Maybe there are other types of materials that can be used.
He's pushing for that.
For firefighters, you need awareness for your physicals on this issue.
Again, you can look to the IAFF for that.
Look to Last Call Foundation.
Kathy Crosby-Bell has a phenomenal page set up there.
We always ask for support for Last Call Foundation because Kathy came to our rescue when no one
else wanted to deal with us.
There's a lot of work to be done still to get PFAS-free gear out there, but you should
be looking at durable water repellents on your gear that are PFAS-free.
I always say safety components makes a PFAS-free DWR.
You can find that on my website.
I'm not endorsed by anybody, so there's no perks or incentives from Mrs. Cotter.
They work with Dr. Peasley.
There are others that wouldn't work with Dr. Peasley.
They didn't want to work with that guy.
If you see it on my website, it's Peasley approved.
Brilliant.
PFAS-free moisture barrier was introduced at FDIC earlier this year.
You can find that as well.
The manufacturers are now doing what the body is asking for.
Couldn't this have been done before?
Absolutely.
I say that this issue, when you think about it, James, is backdraft meets radium girls
meets dark waters.
You had no idea, but they did.
Beautiful.
I want to throw some closing questions at you before we make sure everyone knows where
to find you.
The first one I'd love to ask, is there a book or are there books that you'd love to
recommend?
It can be related to our discussion today or completely unrelated.
Oh, gosh.
I love reading.
I have to tell you, the last book I read was kinder.
Oh, my God, James.
Oh, lavatory.
Oh, I can't.
My heart.
It's beautiful.
Thank you.
Beautiful.
I've always loved the book by Melody Beattie.
Gosh, I can't remember the first name.
It was a great self-help book by Melody Beattie.
Wish I could remember it.
Has a lot to do with crossing the bridge.
That was important to me because when my brother passed, I hadn't spoken to him for years.
I remember the last words I said to him were, I'm crossing the bridge, John and Johnny.
I said, and I'll be here for you when you get here to that book.
Yeah, I love that book.
Beautiful.
Well, thank you for that.
What about films and or documentaries?
I grew up in a movie theater.
My favorite, my all time favorite, Dr. Chewbacca.
When I was 10 years old, I learned, I memorized all the words to Dustin Hoffman's Little Big
Man.
Love that movie.
Documentary.
I love documentaries.
The Devil We Know.
I mean, you got to see that.
Stephanie Shotic.
I think that's Atlas Films.
With Rob, Ken Cook and the folks that were poisoned by Japan.
Yeah, beautifully done.
And then your documentary, Burned, Protecting the Protectors.
If people want to watch that, where can they find it?
Now you can get it on YouTube.
Elijah and Ethereal Films, Elijah Yediboman, along with our executive producer, Mark Ruffalo,
featuring Robert Blunt and of course, General President Ed Kelly and our team at Last Call
Foundation.
Ethereal Films has produced this by putting on their YouTube channel.
And Ethereal Films is also producing Gen X, a chemical cocktail, and they're going to
be crowd surfing that to do the same thing.
So it doesn't have to go through any of the media sites.
It can just be put right there on the Ethereal Films YouTube channel.
Brilliant.
Well, I mentioned having Rob on the show.
Actually, I've just reached out to Sam to see if I can get Ed Kelly on the show, because
I think putting all these to him now, this new administration, just being fully aware
now of some of the things that were wrong with the previous one, I think it would be
an amazing conversation.
And outside of those two, is there a person that you recommend to come on this podcast
as a guest to speak to the first responders, military and associated professions of the
world?
I have to say Dr. Peasley, you know, he sits in every firehouse across the nation now.
He makes science easy to understand, even though he is such a brain.
He's so much fun.
He's wonderful.
Brilliant.
You have to make that happen if you're able to help.
Of course.
Excellent.
All right.
Well, then the very last question before we go to where we can find you, what do you do
to decompress?
I knit and I bird watch and I'm writing.
I'm writing the memoir, the memoir, Products of Deception.
And when will we expect that?
Right now I'm going through the process of speaking with a ghost writer who's very interested
in this story, takes high profile cases.
So hopefully that comes to fruition.
I think that when all is said and done, it would be probably two years before this is
out.
Okay.
Let's do another interview when it does then.
So for people listening, where are the best places to find you as far as websites?
And then what about social media?
Yeah.
So my website is your turnout gear and pfoa.com.
I have a lot of fun on Twitter.
I'm a little bit more reserved on Facebook and I'm very seldom on Insta.
It's the opposite.
I'm on Insta most of the time.
I have no luck with Facebook and Twitter.
I took off my phone because it's just not my jam at all.
So all right.
Well, Dan, I want to say thank you so much.
We have covered a host of topics and I think it's been so important not only to hear obviously
Paul's journey and your relationship and the impact of this disease, not only on his physical
health but also on the relationships and mental health and all these other areas, but also
bringing so much knowledge and being that indomitable spirit, that voice that refuses
to give up because there's an element of that that I can definitely relate to.
So I want to thank you so, so much for being so generous with your time and coming on the
Behind the Shield podcast today.
I'm so grateful, James.
Thank you.
God bless you for the work you do.
We need it.
Thank you.