Eli5: why do firefighters wear oxygen masks when fighting a building fire, but often not in a wildfire? You’re still breathing in smoke…
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First, they’re not oxygen tanks, they’re just atmospheric air. Oxygen tanks have the risk of exploding when exposed to fire cause more problems. Structural fire fighters wear air tanks because they’re in a confined space and run the risk of coming across super heated gases and other non-breathable toxic fumes (which might not actually be smoke in some cases). They use the tanks to provide clean air to breath while working inside those confined spaces.
Wild land firefighters, while exposed to smoke, it’s in a far less concentrated form than structural firefighters are exposed to. Some wild land firefighters will wear masks or bandannas tied over their face to help filter some of the smoke particulate out though. It’s also not feasible to easily refill tanks when they’re hiking miles into the wilderness to get to where they work. Typically they also don’t work directly on top of the fire. Their primary objective is to actually just contain the fire more than extinguish it. So they’ll do things like “cutting line” which is basically creating a fire break by clearing all of the brush and combustible material in a line around the fire in a safe distance so that the fire can keep burning upto that point and then put itself out when there’s no more fuel to burn. The areas they do that in, while they might be slightly smoky, aren’t as dangerous as being exposed to concentrated and super heated smoke like you’ll find inside a burning structure.
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