SAN ANTONIO \u2013 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was with the hazmat team when I first started out, with the chemicals and what have you,\u201d Lt. Carlos Esquivel said, who has served with the department for 25 years.<\/p>\n
Four years ago, Esquivel showed up to the firefighter wellness fair, which offers cancer screenings.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe fair, it caught my cancer. I had melanoma. I was able to take care of it,\u201d Esquivel said. \u201cIt\u2019s one of the quickest spreading cancers, so if you don\u2019t catch it, if we wouldn\u2019t have had this fair, I don\u2019t think I\u2019d have gone to a dermatologist.\u201d<\/p>\n
When it was mentioned that the outcome could have been different, he said, \u201cYes, you\u2019d be talking to my wife.\u201d<\/p>\n
In 2018, KSAT interviewed<\/a> the wife of firefighter Todd \u201cWoody\u201d Woodcock, who died of cancer in 2016. His death prompted changes that KSAT has been covering for the past eight years.<\/p>\n SAFD started changing cleaning and equipment protocols. KSAT even got a look inside the program that swaps out dirty gear<\/a> after fires. Those big changes became a model<\/a> for departments in other cities.<\/p>\n Firefighters who had been around a while repeatedly told KSAT that it used to be a badge of honor to have dirty gear.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you were dirty, it showed you worked hard,\u201d Esquivel said.<\/p>\n He admits it took a massive effort to break away from that mindset.<\/p>\n \u201cA huge culture shift. Everybody\u2019s big and macho until you\u2019re not big and macho,\u201d Esquivel said.<\/p>\n \u201cIt really makes a big difference,\u201d said SAFD firefighter and paramedic Apolinar Lerma, who joined the department four and a half years ago during the cancer-prevention culture shift.<\/p>\n Lerma also got a diagnosis after one of the wellness fairs, where he did an EsoGuard test, which looks for esophageal cancer.<\/p>\n \u201cGot it done, didn\u2019t think anything of it. About a month later, I saw I had a voicemail,\u201d Lerma said.<\/p>\n Lerma had tested positive for Barrett\u2019s Esophagus, a condition that can turn into cancer if it\u2019s not caught on time.<\/p>\n \u201cEsophageal cancer, it\u2019s one of those that people don\u2019t usually know until it\u2019s too late,\u201d Lerma said. \u201cIt was scary, eye-opening.\u201d<\/p>\n He said he is proud to work for a department that has not had one cancer-related firefighter death in three years.<\/p>\n \u201cTo be a large department like this and hit those markers, that is overwhelming. I don\u2019t know any other department that can do this,\u201d said SAFD Emergency Services Deputy Chief Brandon Murray. \u201cWe swap your gear out, we give you opportunities to take a shower, we give you opportunities to clean yourself, your gear, the apparatus.\u201d<\/p>\n Murray said he\u2019s proud of the firefighters themselves, who have bought into the new protocols.<\/p>\n \u201cThey\u2019ve sat down, they\u2019ve educated themselves, they\u2019ve taken this job seriously and decided they\u2019re going to take their health seriously, and we\u2019ve been on a positive streak since then,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n The three parts of the cancer-free initiative involve education through wellness fairs, department policies like those already enacted, and buy-in from city leaders.<\/p>\n \u201cWe got buy-in from city management by allowing us to do the wellness fair on duty. People can come while they\u2019re on duty,\u201d Murray said. \u201cWe also got more buy-in when they bought a second set of gear for every firefighter, so you will never have to be sitting in dirty gear, ever.\u201d<\/p>\n The next wellness fair is scheduled for Feb. 7-8 at the Fire Training Academy, 300 S. Callaghan Road. Murray urged retired firefighters to attend as well.<\/p>\n \u201cRetirees, you need to come. We want you to come,\u201d Murray said. \u201cThis is not just for active firefighters. We want to take care of those who went before us.\u201d<\/p>\n The fairs offer screenings for skin and esophageal cancer, as well as full-body scans. Firefighters also receive information on where to get scans for other types of cancers.<\/p>\n Related KSAT coverage:<\/p>\n Copyright 2026 by KSAT – All rights reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SAN ANTONIO \u2013 It is a statistic the San Antonio Fire Department is beyond proud to announce: no…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":149914,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[2622,120,584,633,82,84,83],"class_list":{"0":"post-149913","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-antonio","8":"tag-cancer","9":"tag-firefighters","10":"tag-health","11":"tag-safd","12":"tag-san-antonio","13":"tag-san-antonio-headlines","14":"tag-san-antonio-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149913","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=149913"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149913\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/149914"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=149913"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=149913"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=149913"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}