In early 2006, the Discovery Channel is scheduled to air a program partially based on research from the Illinois Fire Service Institute. A Discovery crew came to the University during the first week of October to gather information on extreme temperature research, said Richard Jaehne, director of the Illinois Fire Service Institute in Champaign.

During the crew’s four-day visit, Steven Petruzzello and Denise Smith shared with the crew the physical and psychological demands of firefighting by conducting a series of training drills. Petruzzello is a professor of kinesiology and the director of the exercise psychophysiology lab and Smith is a professor and the chair of the department of exercise science at Skidmore College in New York and a research scientist at the Illinois Fire Service Institute.

Tanya Gallagher, dean of ALS, said she was pleased that the Discovery Channel was providing an opportunity for people to learn about the important work Petruzzelo and his fellow colleagues are doing.

“It is more typical for researchers to share their work through scholarly journal publications, but it is as important to inform the public about what we are accomplishing and how it is benefiting society,” Gallagher said. “The Discovery Channel gave us an opportunity to do that.”

The program will shed light on health issues of workers in extreme conditions.

“Over 13 years of doing this research has revealed quite a number of factors that are influenced by performing firefighting activities in the heat while wearing protective turnout gear,” Petruzzello said. “We are interested in trying to develop strategies concerning rehydration, nutrition and fitness to help firefighters and first responders recover more effectively from such ‘acute’ bouts of strenuous activity in hot, hostile environments.”

Smith elaborated on the physical stresses firefighters experience during firefighting activity.

“We know that firefighters do heavy physical work requiring a lot of muscular activity, and the body responds in a certain way with an increase in heart rate and in blood pressure,” Smith said. “Doing a lot of physical work in high-temperature environments and wearing 40 pounds of protective gear doesn’t allow you to evaporate sweat as well putting a greater physiological strain on the firefighter.”

She said the leading cause of line of duty deaths is heart attacks, accounting for 45 percent of the deaths. Their research looks at variables, like how much blood is pumped from the heart and heart rate in response to exercise, to see how the cardiovascular system is affected.

Petruzzello said there are emotional and psychological components to firefighting as well.

“Psychologically, perceived effort is elevated as are thermal sensations, they feel progressively worse as the activity continues, and it is quite likely that their decision making abilities become impaired over time,” Petruzzello said. “We are very interested in continuing our research to understand what factors might predispose certain individuals to be a greater risk for cardiac events as well as what factors might lead to greater disruption of cognitive functioning.”

To demonstrate these conditions, firefighters had to go through firefighting simulations created by Petruzzello and Smith that allowed the researchers to measure their bodies’ heart rates and perceptual and cognitive abilities.

“We feel very positive that what we are doing is contributing to the health and safety of firefighters all over the country,” Jaehne said. “The work we have done has been incorporated into a new national fire research agenda approved by the Fallen Firefighters Association and the U.S. Fire Administration.”

Jaehne hopes to have new missions for the Illinois Fire Service Institute that don’t involve fire, but that involve work in technical rescue from collapsed urban environments. Now that more women are entering in fire service, he also hopes to do more research on gender differences in firefighting activity.

“In the best case scenario, it increases public awareness for firefighter safety, leads to good changes within the fire service and may help support our research as well,” Smith said.