From the New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams, and this is The Daily.

As wildfire seasons grow longer and deadlier, states are increasingly relying on private companies to provide thousands of firefighters to the front lines.

Today, my colleague Hannah Dreyer explains how lax rules and regulatory loopholes

have left many of these firefighters sick, in debt, and on their own.

It's Tuesday, October 28th.

Hannah, it feels like every year there are more and more wildfires, and you have spent months investigating one specific aspect of wildfires, which is the wildfire fighting industry. So I'd love to start

off with you telling us what got you interested in that particular angle? I first started thinking

about this after the fires that tore through Los Angeles in January. I saw that there was all this

footage, all these pictures coming in of the people who were fighting those fires.

And I couldn't help but notice that there were all of these firefighters out there standing in what looked like the most toxic black smoke.

And none of them were wearing masks.

And it got me wondering, why is that and what might be the consequences

of working in that kind of environment with no protection? And so I started digging into the

industry of people who fight wildfires. And what I discovered is that it's completely unlike any industry.

They are out there in these really hazardous conditions and they work without protection.

And a lot of them are getting very sick at young ages. And when they develop things like

severe lung damage or cancer, things that are linked to this smoke exposure,

they're often on their own. Often they don't even have basic health insurance. So basically,

they're vulnerable at several different stages of this process, from starting work to actually

getting sick. Exactly. I mean, what a lot of people have told me is they feel like they

put their health on the line to protect people. And then when they get sick themselves, there's sort of no one there protecting them.

And this is not a small issue. There are tens of thousands of people who do this work almost year

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