Standardizing Firefighters: WFX-FIT, Bona Fide Fitness Requirements, and Fungibility in Wildfire Management

• In Event: Flammable Futures: Encountering Combustion in a Changing Climate 2

Abstract

Wildfires are an inalienable feature of landscapes around the globe. Major recent conflagrations in Australia (2009 & 2016), Canada (2015-2017), Chile (January 2017), and the United States (December 2017) serve as reminders of the perennial presence of fire, as well as the ways in which human choices (like settlement patterns, construction and maintenance procedures, and fire suppression) can have devastating consequences. Humans also make significant choices about how to fight fires, including the fire management institutions we build, the tactics and resources we employ, and the way we train firefighters. One defining element of firefighting is its exceptionally physical nature. Firefighters are expected to have and maintain a high level of physical fitness. Defining, quantifying, and assessing this fitness, however, is a contentious topic that has resulted in significant legal challenge and financial costs for fire agencies. In this paper, I explore the evolution of physical fitness standards for firefighters in Canada, including historical antecedents, a series of legal challenges in 1999, and the resulting nation-wide “WFX-FIT” program. Using theories from the social studies of science as a way of exploring the consequences of imposing standards and legibility, I explore the ways in which fire managers attempt to make their firefighters homogenous, quantified, and fungible for the purposes of emergency response. In particular, I examine the contingent history of how the provinces to establish their own cut-off fitness levels as an example of how systems of standardization can be ‘gamed’ by the very agencies they were meant to support.

Author

• Eric Kennedy, Consortium for Science, Policy, and Outcomes - Arizona State University