Firefighter, Fall River manufacturer are 'protecting the boys' with PFAS-free underwear

Every firefighter’s duty is to save lives and property, but who saves firefighters? A new company is trying to do just that, and is enlisting Fall River seamstresses as help.

9 Alarm Apparel is on a mission to “#protecttheboys” — a cheeky way of advertising their product: the Defender Brief, a special PFAS-free undergarment that blocks 99% of particulates from reaching the skin when worn as underwear, like smoke, soot and toxic chemicals released when fighting a fire. These special garments are being made and sold at a Fall River company, and could even become part of city firefighters’ gear.

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Firefighters march into blazes and walk out covered in the residue of cancer-causing chemicals, clinging to their gear and their bodies, absorbing into their skin. 9 Alarm founder and owner Levi Bousquet, a firefighter himself and an EMT, knows firsthand how important it is to keep his skin clean — especially in areas where the skin has a faster absorption rate.

“It's quite amazing that the network that joins in the area of the groin," Bousquet says. “It's kind of a central hub to all of the different networks that go through our whole body. … It’s pretty important to protect.”

Building a better brief

Bousquet is a firefighter in Northampton, in western Massachusetts. He remembers seeing video of a firefighter friend who had just finished battling a fire, taking off all the various pieces of safety gear he’d worn in the blaze — the helmet, the bulky waterproof coat, layer after layer of fabric. But even through all that safety gear, the blaze’s toxic byproducts had found their way through to his skin, penetrating even to his innermost layer of clothing.

“His white Calvin Klein underwear were completely black at the top,” Bousquet says.

Bousquet has been in the fire service for 17 years, starting as a call firefighter in the town of Monson. In his time on the job, he’s seen his share of action — starting with a call during a major flood five months into the job that almost killed him. And he's seen firsthand how his job has put him at a much higher risk of developing cancer than the general public.

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Firefighters have a 9% higher rate of cancer than the general population, and a 14% higher risk of dying from it. According to the IAFF, from 2002 to 2019, two out of every three firefighters who died in the line of duty died of cancer. The likeliest culprit: the chemical stews they’re exposed to as they fight fires, and the residue that smoke and burning chemicals leave behind on their clothes and skin.

“The system is set up for firefighters to die right when they retire," Bousquet says. “They don’t get to enjoy all that time they spent. … I’ve learned and experienced and been exposed to so much, good or bad, that, at the end of 30 years, you want to have some time.”

In 2016, as particulate-blockers were being rolled out in firefighting hoods, he began developing a garment that firefighters could wear that would do the same thing, but for their skin — especially the most sensitive areas. Before he was a firefighter, Bousquet was a planning engineer for a printed circuit board company in Connecticut. He put his engineering skills to use.

“I started the whole concept actually using a cup. And I bought a 3D printer,” he says. But he abandoned that idea fairly quickly. "Guys aren’t going to wear cups for 24 hours.”

When particulate-blocking fabrics were developed a year and a half later, Bousquet adapted his design to use that instead — but then he found that textile could block particulates but was made with PFAS.

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PFAS, or perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are a class of over 9,000 chemicals that can add durability, stain-repellence and water-resistance to textiles. They’re in widespread use in too many consumer products to count, and in heavy use in firefighter safety gear. Certain PFAS compounds have also been linked to serious medical conditions, among them thyroid disease, high cholesterol levels, ulcerative colitis, and several different kinds of cancer — cancers of the liver, breasts, testicles, and kidneys being most common. A garment meant to keep carcinogens away from the boys couldn’t be made with carcinogenic materials itself. Bousquet went back to the drawing board.

After doing more research, he found another material that acted as a particulate blocker and wasn’t made with PFAS. He’s since had the material tested by the Eurofins Scientific lab, to make sure.

“Third-party testing is complete. The garments are clean and PFAS-free,” he says.

Comfortable and protective

The design itself of the Defender Brief took a lot of trial and error.

“I’ve probably done 15 versions,” he says.

He built test-pairs of the undies with a fold-over waist elastic so they’re comfy to wear during a long, hot day on the job. And they've been through rigorous tests — on himself.

“I have, I’d say, a low-end estimate of about 1,000 hours of wearing them — and I went through the fire academy wearing it,” he says. “And that’s from 8 a.m. until 3 o’clock and working hard, going to fires.”

Bousquet emphasizes that they’re not just a comfy pair of boxer-briefs, but serve their function by keeping firefighters’ skin clean while on the job. They’re not an officially recognized piece of safety gear by the National Fire Protection Association, but they do the job nonetheless, he says.

“Right from the waist elastic, the stitching down through the leg elastics, everything is made to be comfortable and act as a seal,” he says. “Every piece of it is designed with that intent, of either absorbing or restricting like a barrier.”

Fall River clothing manufacturer fills the order

When it came to mass-producing the briefs, Bousquet turned to the Spindle City. The Fall River company Precision Sportswear is his producer, stitching together 500 pairs of the Defender Briefs.

“They’re in production now,” says Neal Venancio, who oversees the 40 employees at Precision Sportswear on Front Street, in the Crescent Mill building. “Once they were happy with the fit and the materials we were using, the construction, once they were happy with it, and it was basically approved for production, they placed a production order.”

The briefs should be finished within the next few weeks and ready for shipment. It’s been a learning process for Bousquet, and fascinating to see how a generations-old mill is producing cutting-edge clothing.

“I wasn’t really too savvy with the textile industry before this,” he says, “but it was really neat to see the players involved, down to the seamstresses, the cutters."

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Bousquet says Precision isn’t just creating the product, but packaging and shipping it too. That leaves him and his business partner, Dan Caron, to focus on marketing and selling the undies to firefighters and fire departments. Another partner, Caroline Johnson, whose husband was a New Britain, Connecticut, firefighter who died of occupational colorectal cancer, has helped shoot video for the 9 Alarm website demonstrating how the fabric blocks smoke from passing through.

Bousquet is currently working with Fall River firefighter and former union president Jason Burns to see if the department is interested in outfitting its members with Defender Briefs, possibly through grant funding. That proposal is still in the offing, but Bousquet has an advocate in Burns, who has pushed for the department to reduce or eliminate as much PFAS in their gear as possible. The company has also built functionality into its website whereby firefighters can buy the briefs themselves using their clothing allowances.

Protecting the boys — and the girls

In the meantime, Bousquet has future plans for 9 Alarm to design and sell garments above the belt.

"I already have requests from guys who want shirts and somehow integrate this for the whole body,” he says.

And lest you take the #protecttheboys slogan too literally, Bousquet is well aware that he has to protect the girls, too — female firefighters are just as susceptible to airborne carcinogens.

“The next garment is going to be a sports bra," he says. “We have a patent pending, and I wrote in a patent for sports bras and all undergarments.”

What started out for Bousquet as a simple idea — to get firefighters to, literally, change their underwear — has been a five-year process that’s about to reach another level.

“I feel humble that I came up with this idea, but it really is on the backs of all the firefighters who have died or suffered through cancer that this came from," he says. “It’s not me, it's them that gave us this idea.”

Dan Medeiros can be reached at dmedeiros@heraldnews.com. Support local journalism by purchasing a digital or print subscription to The Herald News today.

This article originally appeared on The Herald News: Firefighter, Fall River clothing mill making PFAS-free underwear