Exposed and Expendable
As wildfires swept through Los Angeles in January 2025, New York Times reporter Hannah Dreier noticed something strange – firefighters were working bare-faced for days on end, while residents were told to wear masks or stay indoors to protect themselves from dangerous air pollutants.
In over 400 interviews, public records requests to eight agencies, an analysis of thousands of pages of individual medical and service records, and the creation of a database tracking every national crew deployment over the past two decades, Dreier discovered the dramatic and lasting consequences that firefighters were facing from fighting wildfires without protection, and that the Forest Service had understood the dangers of smoke for decades, but downplayed the risk.
As a result of the reporting, Congress passed a bipartisan law, signed in December 2025, that requires the government to pay $450,000 to wildland firefighters who become disabled or die from smoke-related cancers. Five additional bills prompted by this reporting are still pending at the federal level, and it has also spurred state-level spending and regulation in California, as well as new OSHA and Forest Service protections for wildland firefighters, including the reversal of the Forest Service’s decades-long ban on masks.