VIDEO: It is a statistic the San Antonio Fire Department is beyond proud to announce: no firefighter has died from cancer since 2023.
It is a big decrease from the eight deaths reported from 2013 to 2023.
“I was with the hazmat team when I first started out, with the chemicals and what have you,” Lt. Carlos Esquivel said, who has served with the department for 25 years.
Four years ago, Esquivel showed up to the firefighter wellness fair, which offers cancer screenings.
“The fair, it caught my cancer. I had melanoma. I was able to take care of it,” Esquivel said. “It’s one of the quickest spreading cancers, so if you don’t catch it, if we wouldn’t have had this fair, I don’t think I’d have gone to a dermatologist.”
When it was mentioned that the outcome could have been different, he said, “Yes, you’d be talking to my wife.”
In 2018, KSAT interviewed the wife of firefighter Todd “Woody” Woodcock, who died of cancer in 2016. His death prompted changes that KSAT has been covering for the past eight years.
SAFD started changing cleaning and equipment protocols. KSAT even got a look inside the program that swaps out dirty gear after fires. Those big changes became a model for departments in other cities.
