The Department of Labor released their requirements for making a Covid-19 related medical claim recently. I was sent the document (link) by someone in the wildland fire community, who wanted my opinion (I’ve been a wildland firefighter for four years, but will be taking this summer off for reasons unrelated to Covid-19).
After a quick skim (I was in the middle of making brownies at 10 am because #quarantine), my message back was: “cool, looks like they’ll have us covered in the event of Covid exposure.”
His response?
“No, that’s not what it’s saying at all. Read further.”
On the surface, the document is straightforward and seemingly fair, which is how I interpreted it on first reading. Upon a deeper read, my first concern was its use of vague, potentially subjective language; as many people in the federal government (particularly firefighters) know, the DOL is notoriously horrendous at handling worker’s comp claims and often attempts to find any way possible to not have to cover injuries that undoubtedly occurred on the clock. Language that can be interpreted in multiple ways doesn’t help our cause. Everyone in fire knows the system is broken, it’s just something we deal with. As an example, someone I know—a former rappeller—was literally rappelling a fire (like, on a rope below a helicopter) when they injured both of their knees, and it took months to prove that it was work related. If they hadn’t had the time or resources to put up a months-long fight, they wouldn’t have had their medical expenses covered. (It’s worth noting that while the CARES Act, passed in late March, covers testing and possible vaccination for Covid-19, it would not cover any expenses incurred due to complications of the virus.)
With countless stories like the above as precedent, it’s not hard to imagine what hundreds of Covid-19 claims could look like this summer if the claims process isn’t streamlined. Endless paperwork; endless doctor’s notes and visits; endless dead ends—spending months advocating for yourself after having been out of work and in quarantine for a virus you very likely picked up while working.
The routes for exposure in fire are, after all, innumerable. You’re in trucks or buggies with 2-10 people all the time. You’re in fire camps with hundreds or thousands of people at a time. Many people in the Forest Service who I’ve spoken to for other Covid-19 stories have referred to fire camps as “petri dishes.” Having personally gotten camp crud at least once a season for the last four years, this is hardly an over-exaggeration, and it’s further indication that we need a very clear picture of how we’re going to manage OWCP (Office of Workers’ Compensation) claims when outbreaks in the fire community are inevitable.
The truth—and everyone in the fire world knows this and is genuinely trying very hard to figure out how to deal with it—is that regardless of what measures are put in place to protect firefighters from this, there are almost undoubtedly going to be outbreaks of Covid-19 during fire season. There is an inherent amount of exposure not just because of the nature of the job but because of the nature of this illness—particularly, that it’s asymptomatic in a large amount of cases.
The DOL document lays out its policy for what is required of both employees and supervisors of employees who have Covid-19, but it also leaves a lot of room for interpretation and a lot of unanswered questions. Will they deem wildland firefighters “high-risk” and thus able to streamline the claims process because of the nature of their work? Probably, but because the technical term for a wildland firefighter is “forestry technician,” the interpretation of our job title could be a point of contention. This is a concern I’ve heard multiple times within the seasonal fire community; perhaps the first step is to assure firefighters, unequivocally, that they will be deemed “high risk.” For clarification, the document considers “high-risk” positions as those that bring employees in close contact with each other and the public; people in these positions are deemed more likely to be exposed and thus, in theory, should be able to file a claim more easily than employees that aren’t considered “high risk.”
But the logistics of a successful, verifiable claim is another thing that I personally found to be too dependent on interpretation and circumstance—something that may bite firefighters in the ass down the road.
They must first verify that their type of work is, indeed, high risk. Then, they must get a medical diagnosis. Okay, fair enough. Will tests even be available on a large-enough scale to handle a large volume of potential cases? Will the rural hospitals near large fire incidents be able to handle a fire camp outbreak? Will you be able to find a doctor near your bunkhouse when you live three hours from the nearest city? These questions are difficult to answer but it’s critical that we have answers before we inevitably subject small, rural communities to Covid-19 outbreaks.
So once the employee finds a doctor—likely not their normal doctor as most of us travel long distances to our duty station—they are then required “to provide medical evidence establishing that the diagnosed COVID-19 was aggravated, accelerated, precipitated, or directly caused by your work-related activities.” It goes on to say that “establishing causal relationship generally requires a qualified physician's opinion, based on a reasonable degree of medical certainty, that the diagnosed condition is causally related to your employment conditions. This opinion must be based on a complete factual and medical background.”
While it’s not likely to be a huge problem, this may require your doctor to take some medical liberties in getting you an opinion, because people will likely not know exactly where or how they contracted the virus, given the aforementioned asymptomatic nature of it.
So what can we do?
First of all, it’s critical that individual districts begin the work to protect their seasonal employees from unnecessary and time-consuming red tape when dealing with Covid-19 claims. I know this is already taking place on many districts, and they deserve credit for that. But surely, other districts are still lagging in this realm. One method for achieving greater protection for seasonals, as suggested by a friend in the fire community, is to hire claims specialists to work with firefighters on the paperwork required for any work-related injury claims. This paperwork isn’t a walk in the park, as literally any firefighter who has ever twisted an ankle while walking into a fire, burned their leg from falling into hot ash or gotten a concussion by a falling tree branch can tell you. We need knowledgeable and effective advocates within our districts and forests who can fill that gap and provide us with the knowledge to file a claim quickly and adequately, so we can receive the care we need and, hopefully, return to work to continue supporting ourselves and out families. Another suggestion I’ve heard is to strongly recommend or even require that seasonals pick up health insurance during their onboarding in the spring. Federal health insurance options are available to seasonals while they’re employed through the summer, but many crews and districts don’t take the time to help their employees sign up for it—a step that can be particularly helpful for new employees or those who haven’t applied for federal health plans before.
But what I’m ultimately arguing for are more explicit, possibly even “blanket” claims policies that err on the side of employees rather than a federal agency. It’s hard to say what this would look like, but perhaps it would give any essential government employee—which firefighters undoubtedly are—automatic workman’s comp in the event of a Covid-19 diagnosis.
On that note, is it that crazy to think that we should just cover our seasonal employees regardless of how they got Covid-19? The nature of firefighting, for many crews, is that you are with your crew all day every day for damn near six months. During busy seasons (after a few weeks of training) we can expect to be on the clock for over 130 days in a five-month season. Some quick math will tell you that leaves only about 20 days at home in that time frame, usually spent sleeping or hanging out with other crew members, often in crew housing—this is especially true for seasonal employees, who may not have families yet and often rely on seasonal housing provided by the government. More quick math: even if you’re working 110 days during a five-month season, you’re still spending nearly 3/4 of your summer on duty. Statistically speaking, the chances of exposure while working are substantially higher than days off (at least on hotshot crews), where you’re spending most of your time off in the bunkhouse sleeping, doing laundry and maybe hanging out with your crewmembers (even though you should all be sick of each other after spending every waking hour together during fire assignments.)
The core of my argument is that policies that appear to have been created to protect the agency rather than their employees are not an appropriate path forward. Perhaps this could be a prime opportunity to clean up our act when it comes to a broken system that sides, time after time, with the agency over the employee? Perhaps Covid-19 will reveal the glaring issues that have afflicted our workers’ comp system so deeply that it’s hardly effective in serving its function anymore?
We should not have to fight for support from our employer in the growing likelihood of a Covid-19 diagnosis this summer. On the contrary, it should be the last thing we have to worry about while recovering from a life-threatening virus.
We already accept an unbelievable amount of risk in this job—which we’re often happy to do, as fire is a lifestyle that we all love to some degree—but adding the additional liability of contracting Covid-19 and not having the resources in place to make the claims process easier for us when it’s almost assured that there will be outbreaks…this is surely more than we signed up for.