Melbourne firefighter Mick Tisbury has always known his work is dirty and dangerous. Running into a thousand-degree inferno presents some obvious risks. “If you’ve got half a brain, you’d be running out,” he says.
It’s not just the flames and the heat. Firefighters are exposed to thousands of carcinogens on the job. In July, the World Health Organization classified firefighting as a cancer-causing occupation.
By and large this just comes with the territory, Mick tells Australian Story. “If a chemical storage facility goes up in flames, we have to do whatever is needed to put it out.”
But there are some risks he firmly believes no firefighter should have to take. “Training should be safe. And the special foam we use to extinguish chemical fires should not pose a risk to human health or the environment when there are perfectly good alternatives.”
Mick joined the Melbourne Metropolitan Fire Brigade (MFB) at 21, following in the footsteps of his father Keith, a district officer. Mick had “pedigree”, says his 1989 recruit course alumni, David Hamilton. “He always had an opinion and if he saw something wrong, he’d challenge it, or at least question it.”
So when Mick started to hear a firefighting training facility in rural Victoria might be contaminated with dangerous chemicals, exposing the truth became an obsession. One he would pursue so single-mindedly it would eventually have unexpected blowback, leaving his family, and himself, fearful for their welfare.
Mick acknowledges he put noses out of joint, but his rationale for sticking at his investigation was simple. His job was to protect firefighters and his community. When he came across an unfamiliar chemical compound name in secret documents, Mick realised Victoria was caught up in a contamination disaster facing people worldwide.
He set his sights on finding solutions for everyone. And along the way he’s helped find an ingenious solution to help firefighters “rid” their bodies of what’s been coined “forever chemicals”.
“I don’t have university degrees; I’m just an idiot firefighter. But I trusted my gut. I kept trusting my gut. And we’re kicking goals.”
Cancer cluster reports prompt fight for answers
It was late December 2011 and Mick was on a lunch break when he saw a story in The Herald Sun about a possible cancer cluster at the Fiskville Training College, a huge facility run by the Country Fire Authority (CFA).
Much-respected former head of the organisation, Brian Potter, was speaking out about concerns he’d raised internally since retirement, to no avail.
He was battling an autoimmune disease and multiple cancers possibly related to his time at Fiskville.
Mick had been taking trainees to the facility, 95 kilometres west of Melbourne, sporadically for a decade as an instructor. The rural setting made it perfect for the city-based MFB to teach recruits how to put out chemical fires, the kind that generate a lot of smoke and waste prohibited in built-up areas.
At first, Mick thought the story must be a beat-up. He had always believed the CFA when it assured him it ran a safe shop.
Mick was a union delegate at the time, and soon started taking calls from concerned instructors and course candidates. But when he badgered both the CFA and his own employer for proof the facility was safe, he got nowhere. “This started alarm bells ringing,” Mick says. “And the more you started looking, the scarier it became.”
He started writing Freedom of Information requests in his own time, but all he received in return were “boxes and boxes of often heavily redacted material that were useless”. Eventually, he got access to site reports dating back to the 1980s containing warnings about unsafe work practices, contamination and the need for remediation. He was shocked to discover he’d been unwittingly exposing trainees, and himself, to danger.
Then he phoned Ruth Lamperd, the experienced journalist who wrote the article, and together they started swapping documents and digging for more. So began an unlikely alliance.
At times his passion was exhausting. “I’d get phone calls in the middle of the night with something that just occurred to him,” she says. “Mick was determined to get to the bottom of what chemicals were used there and what risk they posed to human health.”
“I go to a lot of firefighters’ funerals,” Mick says. “And the only people there are the family and firefighters burying their mates. You never see a government official there. You never see a chemical company official there or the salesmen selling their products. But when one of your colleagues gets crook or passes on, it hurts you and you want to stop that happening again.”
‘Forever chemicals’ having impact years later
MFB instructor Tony Martin had run many courses at the CFA training college over the years.
But when he was lucky enough to survive a brain aneurysm, he gave little thought to what caused it.
In mid-2012, Tony texted Mick a photo of the water that his recruits were using to do firefighting exercises at Fiskville. It was green and, according to Tony, smelt awful. Mick told him to stop the training immediately, and for a while, his bosses agreed to err on the side of safety and suspended training at the facility.
Soon after that, Tony had to be treated for two more aneurysms, this time on the other side of his brain.
“I can’t prove that was from that visit to Fiskville or the cumulative effect over the years of all the stuff I deal with in firefighting,” he says. “But when I was diagnosed the following year with prostate cancer that certainly opened my eyes and got my head running about why it occurred now.”
Tony was later found to have pancreatic cancer too, but the tumour was benign.
Then Mick had a breakthrough. He received some results for monthly water testing at Fiskville. Every so often there was a separate page with two mysterious acronyms: PFOS and PFOA.
It was the first he had heard of these chemicals, which had been active ingredients in the firefighting foam they’d been using to fight flammable liquid fires. He then rang UK-based expert Dr Roger Klein, a medical doctor and physical chemist who had advised fire services around the world on the issue.
He explained how PFOS and PFOA were part of a bigger group of man-made chemicals known as PFAS, which stands for perfluoroalkyl substances.
Often referred to as “the forever chemicals”, they’re extremely heat resistant, spread quickly, and aren’t easily broken down.
They were used on textiles and leather to make them stain and water resistant, in food packaging and on non-stick cookware. But firefighting foam is probably “the most dispersive” use of PFAS molecules.
“When you’re fighting a fire, you can’t contain all the foam and it gets into waterway; the waterways ultimately drain into the ocean where they spread across the planet,” Dr Klein says. “PFAS molecules have been found in fresh snow on Everest. They’ve been found in both polar regions. Every person on the planet is contaminated to some extent.”
Before the 1980s, Victorian firefighting services had used a protein-based product made of “blood and bone” to suppress liquid chemical fires. Mick says the new foam was made by the multinational company 3M and was called Light Water. “We loved it,” he says. “It didn’t reek like the old foam and was more effective.”
The PFAS chemical family has been linked to thyroid disease, autoimmune disease, elevated levels of cholesterol, low foetal weight, testicular and kidney cancer. It lingers for decades if not centuries in the environment and has a half-life in the human body of between five and eight years, which is considered “extremely persistent,” Dr Klein says.
Mick was taken aback. He and his colleagues had been told the foam was safe. Firefighters would hose down the engine bays to get rid of the oil and clean the station barbecues with it. Mick remembers at Christmas they’d cover his station in foam to make it look festive.
Chemicals leach into surrounding land
Yet, by the time Mick made his discovery, the potential dangers of PFAS had been known for decades.
According to testimony given to the US House of Representatives in 2019, as early as the 1950s, 3M had discovered in its own animal studies that PFAS was toxic.
When it sold the chemical to Dupont to make Teflon cookware, 3M included a Material Safety Data Sheet, dated 1997, with a label reading, “Cancer warning: Contains a chemical which can cause cancer”, and cited studies the two companies had jointly conducted. Dupont removed the labels.
In 2000, 3M announced it was phasing out its best seller, Scotchguard, and then did the same with its firefighting foam, known as aqueous film forming foam (AFFF).
But in Australia, use of the chemicals continued.
“We had significant stocks of firefighting foam distributed around the country, including on defence bases and airports,” says Professor Mark Taylor, a human health and environmental scientist, who’s now the chief scientist based at the Victorian EPA. “And people were bolted onto the use of AFFF because they knew it worked.”
In 2010, the MFB started making the move to fluorine-free foam. But the damage was already done at Fiskville. PFAS had leached from the training college to neighbouring properties. It was found 16km from the facility.
One young family of fourth-generation farmers had a sheep contamination notice put on their stock. They packed up and left the area. So did Charmaine Callow and her father. They had bred prize winning Belted Galloways and were concerned that some were giving birth to calves with unusual deformities.
“It’s scary because you don’t know what it’s going to do to your body,” Charmaine says. “It’s like I’m living with a ticking time bomb inside me and even now I still worry what might happen in the future.”
After getting nowhere with his complaints to the CFA, the family turned to Mick for help. But there was little the firefighter could do other than argue for the closure of the training college.
Going against CFA ‘like shooting Bambi’
In late 2014, the newly elected Victorian Government announced a parliamentary inquiry into Fiskville.
Interested parties were invited to make submissions.
A CFA-commissioned Monash University study found there was a higher incidence of melanoma, testicular and brain cancer among Fiskville attendees than in the general population.
Three months later, the inquiry hearings began. But by now, the state government and the United Firefighters’ Union were in the throes of a bitter enterprise bargaining dispute that some CFA volunteers saw as a threat to their status as firefighters.
Prime minister Malcolm Turnbull weighed in behind the volunteers.
“The dispute became a political football, with issues raised in the inquiry used as campaign tools,” says Simon Ramsay, a former CFA volunteer who was the state Liberal MP for the area including Fiskville, and was also on the parliamentary inquiry committee.
“It was an unfortunate distraction from the very serious issues Mick was raising in the hearings. He was seen as the frontman of the union and a threat to the CFA that had a strong, loyal brand.”
Mick quips that speaking out against the CFA is “like shooting Bambi”.
When the CFA board finally shut down the training college permanently because of PFAS contamination, many volunteers were upset.
“It came at some great sadness for CFA and its members that the place where they came, their meeting place to train to be collegiate, was now closed,” the organisation’s recently appointed Chief Officer, Jason Heffernan tells Australian Story.
“But not only that, it had an effect on the local community. There were people that were employed to work at the Fiskville training academy.”
‘You need to drop this’: Mick experiences threats
According to Mick, strange things started happening at home whenever he commented publicly about the facility. His letterbox was blown up several times, his rubbish bins destroyed. One day he came home to find the kids’ dog was dead. Another time it was the miniature pet pig.
For a long time, the firefighter thought it must be coincidence. But then he received a letter with a photograph of him with one of his children, and a run of threatening phone calls. Mick never identified who the perpetrators were.
In 2016, the parliamentary inquiry found CFA management and the regulator WorkSafe had failed in their duties, and recommended victims be assisted through a state government redress scheme.
“I’m incredibly sorry for the experiences that anyone has had,” CFA’s Jason Heffernan says. “I apologise for the practices of the past management. In hindsight CFA management could have done better. But I can see an organisation that was really trying to come to grips with what the issue was and how it should act.”
By now, Mick was sick of the politics. “I just wanted to find solutions,” he says.
Although fire services were increasingly moving to fluorine-free foam, the PFAS contamination remained in and around defence bases, airports and fire stations across Australia. It was in the soil and the waterways. It was also in fire trucks so every time fire fighters turned on their hoses, PFAS flowed into the environment.
Mick wanted to get rid of that legacy contamination in Victoria. “Everybody said you can’t do anything,” he says. “But they didn’t know me. Firefighters never give up.”
Mick’s father had lived by the edict that a firefighter always has a crack at fixing anything. He taught his son how to repair cars, boats and buildings.
In 2017, the MFB found PFAS in the firefighting water at its new training centre. Mick was enlisted to work out why that was happening, given the service had stopped using PFAS foams before it was built.
“We pulled a truck apart and found PFAS had crystalised in all the internal pipework in the pumps,” Mick says. “So, we were being contaminated every time we were using water and so was the environment.”
Mick and his team devised a 32-step process that included reverse flushing the pumps with hot water to decontaminate the trucks.
Dr Klein was so impressed by Mick’s ground-breaking work, he asked him to address the United Nations Stockholm Convention in 2019, that he was attending as an expert.
“Although in a senior leadership position, Mick’s a very active firefighter, which was absolutely ideal for giving the committee some idea of the practicalities of using firefighting foam.”
Mick flew out to Geneva with his mate David Hamilton. They had no idea what they were getting into. “It’s a pretty big thing,” David says. “You’ve got governments, agencies, advocacy groups all in this one place at one time to get one shot at making change.”
“I was the first uniformed operational firefighter to tell them what actually happens when you use foam,” Mick says. “And not everyone was happy to hear that.”
Some countries argued against the ban, finding support from the fluoro chemical industry.
As debate continued late into the night, Mick took a toilet break. Alone at the urinal, he suddenly felt two big men standing right behind him. As Mick tells the story, one of them said, “You need to drop this; there’s too much money involved.”
Then they took another step towards him. Mick could hear them breathing. “They were there to intimidate me,” he says. “I won’t lie; I was shaking like a leaf.” So, when he turned to face the men, Mick saw a gap between them and made a sudden run for the door and reported the harassment to police on site.
The attending countries ended up voting unanimously to ban PFOS and PFOA, but with some exemptions – including firefighting. Australia was gearing up for the 2019 Federal election, the government was in caretaker mode and had to abstain.
Blood donation and firefighters: Mick’s big idea
Mick was on a roll. But he wanted to see if it was possible to rid the human body of PFAS contamination.
“The uncertainty about whether the contamination would make you sick down the track messes with your mind,” he says. “It’s like living with a ticking time bomb.”
In 2016, the MFB offered its firefighters a free blood test to check for elevated PFAS levels. As results came in, Mick’s showed much higher levels than some of his mates, which surprised him given they’d all had considerable exposure to the PFAS foam.
Mick had read studies showing women tended to have lower PFAS levels than men, but he didn’t know why. One night he couldn’t sleep and went down to his shed to change the oil in his wife’s car. “That’s when I had this light bulb moment,” Mick says. “The reason you change the oil in your car is, so you don’t blow the engine up. Maybe women have lower PFAS levels because they lose blood when they menstruate? So maybe if firefighters donate blood or plasma, we could get this stuff out of our bodies.”
Professor Mark Taylor was sitting on his verandah when the firefighter called to run the idea past him. He remembers thinking it seemed reasonable. “I knew that PFAS was attached to proteins and there’s a tonne of proteins in blood. So, if you’re donating blood, you’re also discharging proteins, and the same thing with plasma.”
Professor Taylor assembled a team of experts at Macquarie University. Mick lobbied the MFB to provide funding, and the clinical trial involving hundreds of firefighters got underway.
In April, the peer-reviewed findings were published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). The results exceeded Professor Taylor’s expectations. “It showed very clearly that the giving of blood or plasma reduces PFAS levels in blood by about 10 per cent over the year, and plasma by about 30 per cent.”
The Red Cross decided blood and plasma posed no risk to donation recipients. But Mick still wants people with high levels of PFAS to be able to make therapeutic donations which don’t form part of the blood bank.
In June this year, he and David Hamilton returned to Geneva where the UN was debating the addition of a third PFAS chemical called PFHxS to its annexure of substances to be eliminated. It was the active ingredient in later model AFFF foams still used by many firefighting services overseas.
Mick shared the results of the world-first blood trial and argued that PFHxS should be listed without exemptions because it’s impossible for firefighters to use it safely. Eight days of discussion later, the vote went his way.
Making sure ‘this doesn’t happen again’
Back in Melbourne, Mick is now an acting deputy commissioner at the fire service that’s been rebadged as Fire Rescue Victoria. But management has not dented his determination to push for change.
Dr Klein says the federal government has been too slow acknowledging the importance of PFAS contamination. Mick agrees.
“The previous federal government dragged its heels,” he says. “Australia is a signatory to the Stockholm Convention but still hasn’t ratified the bans on the three PFAS compounds.”
Some of the states have gone it alone. Queensland was the trailblazer, using existing provisions in its EPA act to stop the use of PFAS if there’s a chance it will be released into the environment. Both South Australia and New South Wales have introduced specific legislation banning it.
Mick hopes the Albanese Government will draw a line in the sand. “There’s a new energy, a new commitment,” he says. “And Australia needs to be leading the way.”
Six years after the Victorian parliamentary inquiry into Fiskville delivered its report, the state government has announced at a $57 million redress scheme to support people who trained, worked or lived at or near the training college between 1972 and 2015.
For Mick, it’s recognition that what happened in the past was wrong and about “making sure it never happens again in the future”.
The former Fiskville site now cuts a desolate picture. The bar where CFA and MFB recruits spent many happy hours is deserted. So too are the living quarters where recruits stayed for their week away in the bush.
The CFA says it has encased PFAS contamination at the former facility in a mound surrounded by rabbit-proof fencing. And is remediating neighbouring farmland.
Jason Heffernan praises Mick Tisbury and former CFA boss Brian Potter, who first raised the alarm about Fiskville, describing them as the “catalysts” for change.
Three years after he blew the whistle on Fiskville, Brian died. But his widow is glad that Mick continued Brian’s quest for justice.
“There’s still lots of people who have to be looked after,” Diane Potter says.
On a recent trip back to the now padlocked front gates Fiskville to check up on Charmaine Callow, Mick got choked up with emotion.
He thought he’d got over Fiskville. But the anger he’d felt all those years ago about what people like her went through was still there.
“I’m not ashamed to admit that I realised ‘maybe I’m not OK’ and maybe I need to access mental health supports,” he says. “I urge anyone finding it tough to do the same.”
For Charmaine, hearing about the UN bans on some PFAS compounds and the blood study results was restorative.
“Mick’s given me hope that all of what we’ve been through, wasn’t for nothing,” she says. “And that there are solutions.”
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