Nebraska
Nebraska bill would provide cancer benefits to firefighters
LINCOLN, Neb. (WOWT) – A bill before Nebraska lawmakers would provide workers’ compensation benefits to firefighters diagnosed with cancer without requiring them to prove their cancer came from the job.
LB-400 entered its first round of debate Monday. The bill was introduced by Sen. Dave Wordekemper of Fremont, a longtime firefighter.
“Firefighters don’t want to die. They don’t want to leave their jobs, their families, their fellow firefighters,” Wordekemper said.
Cancer risks for firefighters
Wordekemper said firefighters face increased cancer risks compared to the general population.
“Firefighters face a nine percent increase in cancer diagnosis, and a fourteen percent increase in cancer-related deaths compared to the general population,” he said.
“This isn’t speculation, this isn’t a theory, this is an established scientific fact from an independent international body,” Wordekemper said.
Trevor Towey, president of the Omaha Professional Firefighters union, said modern fires pose greater chemical risks than in previous decades.
“Fires of today are not like the fires in the seventies and the eighties. The products that are inside homes burn faster, there’s chemicals in the fires and firefighters are exposed to that,” Towey said.
Opposition to the bill
The bill was opposed by Sen. Mike Jacobson of North Platte and Sen. Bob Hallstrom.
Jacobson argued the bill could be unaffordable for smaller communities.
“Villages and cities are paying for it; and how are they paying for it? With property taxes,” Jacobson said.
Jacobson said current law is adequate.
“The current law is working. No one is turning their backs on firefighters,” he said. “Their benefits are all better than any other city employee.”
Jacobson referenced his own skin cancer diagnosis during the debate.
“Some of you have probably noticed I have a couple of cuts on my face. Well, it wasn’t from shaving,” he said. “I’ve never been a firefighter, by gosh somehow I’ve got cancer, so I’m dealing with it. Not every firefighter gets cancer.”
Current law and proposed changes
Current Nebraska law lists 20 cancers as presumed job-related if a firefighter is diagnosed. However, families are not compensated until the firefighter dies.
Towey said several Omaha firefighters are currently battling cancer.
“I can tell you we have got about 5 or 6 right now, and a couple of them are continuing to fight for their lives,” he said.
“Why would not those same cancers be also presumed while they are still alive, while they can still recover, while they can still fight and come back and service our community? That’s all we’re asking for,” Towey said.
Under current law, firefighters who get cancer and believe it is job-related must sue insurance companies to receive benefits. The proposed bill would allow firefighters to receive workers’ compensation benefits automatically, with employers able to sue if they believe the cancer was not job-related.
Towey said 33 other states have similar legislation.
“We’re not asking something that is outrageous, we’re not asking for something to be created that doesn’t exist,” he said.
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The Nebraska Extension will host a statewide webinar, “Nebraska Cattle Health Outlook: New World screwworm update, Scours prevention and diagnostics, and UNL research on bovine pinkeye” on Thursday, April 16, from 6 to 7:30 p.m. MT. The program is designed for Nebraska beef producers and allied industry professionals seeking timely information on late-spring herd health risks.
The webinar will feature Dr. Matt Hille, Assistant Professor and diagnostic pathologist at the Nebraska Veterinary Diagnostic Center. After graduating with his DVM from Iowa State University, Dr. Hille practiced feedlot and cow-calf medicine in South Dakota for five years. He returned to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln to complete a Ph.D. and residency in Anatomic Pathology. His research and diagnostic interests focus on infectious diseases and immunology of beef cattle.
Topics will include:
New World screwworm update
Prevention and diagnostic strategies for calf scours
UNL research on bovine pinkeye
The program will provide practical, research-based information to help producers make informed herd health decisions heading into the late spring and summer months.
The webinar is free, but register for the link at https://pears.io/events/nebraskaextension/5109
For more information, contact Brock Ortner at 308-327-2312 or bortner2@nebraska.edu
-University of Nebraska–Lincoln
Nebraska
Massive wildfires dealt another blow to Nebraska ranchers. Climate change may make them more common. – Flatwater Free Press
This story is made possible through a partnership between Flatwater Free Press and Grist, a nonprofit environmental media organization.
Mike Wintz was nearly 4 miles away and in the thick of fighting the Morrill Fire when he heard over the radio that the flames were headed for his home.
“I didn’t leave. I just basically fought my way back towards my ranch,” Wintz said. “A couple of the other outfits were headed to the house to kind of head it off … I just put my trust in the neighbors and the other firefighters.”
The group stopped the fire near Wintz’s front door, but the next day, the winds shifted, the fire flared and Wintz’s home was threatened a second time.
A wall of smoke, wind and heat rolled hard and fast over the hill toward Wintz’s house as a group of firefighters and local ranchers fought to protect his home.
“We would have lost the house … (and) all the buildings, if it wouldn’t have been for them guys, because they stood right in the front of the fire and stayed right with it,” Wintz said. “It got to where it was kind of scary. Am I going to be able to keep on breathing? It was that heavy.”
In all his decades as a rancher and volunteer firefighter in western Nebraska, Wintz had never seen anything like this before. This fire, the largest documented blaze in state history, took out nearly everything in its path, including all of Wintz’s grazing land, about 900 bales of hay, the hair off his bulls and potentially two of his calves. The flames left his yearlings with singe marks on their backs.
His experience is just one of many ranchers in the state as wildfires continue to spark up after a record-breaking mild and dry winter. And the current conditions are likely not a one-off.
With the Earth continuing to warm as a result of climate change, Nebraska will likely see more volatile winters, said Eric Hunt, a University of Nebraska-Lincoln agriculture meteorology and climate resilience extension educator. While winters are likely to be more wet, there will be years that are more extremely mild and dry.
This could set the stage for more intense wildfires and further challenge Nebraska’s cattle industry — a critical part of the state’s economy.
Nebraska ranked first in the country for beef and veal exports in 2024 with $1.66 billion, according to the state Department of Agriculture. In the same year, Nebraska produced nearly 16% of the country’s receipts from cattle and calves, which were also the state’s most valuable commodity. And most of Nebraska’s second-most valuable commodity, corn, is used as livestock feed.
While the industry generates greenhouse gas emissions, it is also threatened by the resulting climate impacts.
“We’re entering a new kind of wildfire era for this generation than what past generations have experienced, and it’s pretty well established on why,” said Dirac Twidwell, a rangeland and fire ecologist at UNL.
Three months in, 2026 has already set a record for most documented acres burned by wildfire in the state, breaking the 2012 record, according to the Nebraska State Climate Office.
Even before the recent wildfires, Nebraska’s cattle industry was already facing headwinds. The number of cattle operations has declined between 2012 and 2022. Meanwhile, the ag business is aging, with the average age of a producer in the state at nearly 57 years old.
“I think there’s a lot of producers … they don’t have a second generation coming back, and if they do, the writing on the wall sometimes says that there’s other ways to make money that’s easier, and you can make more money doing other things,” said Jaslyn Livingston, a rancher, volunteer firefighter and appointed member of the Cattlemen’s Beef Board. “If you’re thinking about retiring anyways … (the wildfires) just kind of could be the deal that tips it over.”
Climate change and wildfires
Hunt, the UNL ag climate expert, was blunt when it comes to describing the current conditions.
“Things are very, very bad at the western part of the state … I can’t emphasize enough how disastrous this winter has been for western Nebraska,” he said.
This past winter was the second warmest and fourth driest on record. Nebraska hit its warmest average high temperature at 47.3 degrees, beating the winter of 1999-2000 by nearly 3 degrees. Most of the state hit record high temperatures in the 80s and 90s on March 21.
Nearly the entire state is in a drought, with parts of west, central and northeast Nebraska categorized in extreme drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor’s March 26 update.
As global temperatures continue to rise as a result of climate change, Nebraska could expect to see more years with mild and dry conditions like this, Hunt said.
Between 1994 to 2023, the majority of Nebraska saw its average winter temperature increase by more than 2 degrees compared to 1895 to 1960, according to the 2024 state climate change impact assessment report.
Meanwhile, the Panhandle and west central, central and northeast Nebraska all saw small decreases in precipitation amounts during the winter.
These dry and warm conditions make the land more vulnerable to wildfires, especially when combined with strong winds. The Panhandle saw some gusts hit over 70 mph, possibly stronger when the Morrill Fire started.
Though the largest on record, the Morrill Fire is only one of seven large wildfires that have broken out in the past month, according to the Fire Enterprise Geospatial Portal. The Morrill, Cottonwood, Anderson Bridge and Road 203 wildfires all erupted in central and western Nebraska within a few days of each other.
Just as firefighters were reaching containment on the Morrill and Cottonwood fires, two new blazes started up in the Sandhills and rapidly grew to about 50,000 acres.
As of March 30, the Nebraska Emergency Management Agency estimated wildfires have impacted about 945,381 acres so far this year, though the agency noted not all wildfires had confirmed acreage data.
Nebraska has about 23 million acres of range and pasture land, roughly half of which is located in the Sandhills.
Fire is not new to this part of the state, Twidwell said, but a new trend is emerging.
“It’s kind of a shock and trauma factor to a state when it hasn’t happened to this scope and scale, but it’s following a trend we’re seeing throughout the Great Plains of increased wildfire currents, activity and total acres burned,” Twidwell said.
Still, Nebraska is classified nationally as low vulnerability to wildfires due, in part, to the state having had fewer fires to date and the fact that the state is largely rural and fewer lives and structures are at risk, Twidwell said.
The recent wildfires are responsible for damaging or destroying about 112 structures and are responsible for at least one death as of March 31, according to NEMA.
But the wildfires also have scorched hundreds of thousands of acres of something that many Nebraskans in that part of the state hold close to heart: land.
“There’s a lot of people out there that this (ranching) is their livelihoods. This is what their families have been for generations,” said Matt Cover, a rancher in the Sandhills. “These people … we saved their houses when we fought fires, we saved most of all these houses, but now they have to live in the middle of these sand dunes, and what a depressing setting to wake up to … every single day.”
Aftermath of the wildfires
For 21 years, Wintz and his wife, Kayla, worked to maintain the leased land their ranch sits on after taking over the cow-calf operations from Kayla’s parents, who had been in the business for over 25 years. In less than six hours, nearly all of that land burned.
For the Wintz family and other ranchers, the timing couldn’t have been worse — the wildfires hit just as calving season was starting. It’s the one time you don’t want to move cattle around, Wintz said. The devastation caused by the fire left them no choice.
The stress can take its toll on pregnant cows, and Wintz knew he was going to lose a few calves. Thus far, he has lost six.
“The impact that it will be this fall is I won’t be able to probably keep any replacement heifers for the next year’s herd,” Wintz said. “I imagine I’ll cull some cows a little bit deeper than I normally would, too … My herd will be reduced, that’s for sure.”
What has kept him going day after day has been his neighbors and folks from across the state who have donated. A couple offered to let him move his cattle onto their land, which saves him some expense.
Many folks have also donated enough hay for him to make it into the summer and a bit longer in case his ranch doesn’t green up by then. Right now, he doesn’t have carryover hay for next year. Hay prices before the wildfires were relatively cheap, said Livingston, the Cattlemen’s Beef Board member. Now, due to the demand caused by the wildfires and drought, she expects they will go up.
Wintz is also planning to lease additional land for summer grass, a costly move as rental rates for both pasture and cow-calf pairs increased by nearly 4% in 2025, according to UNL.
Some businesses have also reached out to him about helping with fencing material, another item on his to-do list. He won’t have to worry about burned buildings, though other ranchers impacted by wildfires aren’t so lucky.
Wintz said the wildfire will likely impact his operation the next two to three years.
It’s a very involved industry that continues to consolidate. The number of cattle-and-calves operations in the state fell from 23,280 in 2012 to 16,958 in 2022, according to Census of Agriculture reports.
Ag is also an aging industry: Nearly 30,000 producers in Nebraska in 2022 were age 65 or older.
Younger farmers and ranchers, without much capital, might not be able to handle a disaster like these wildfires, said Al Davis, a former rancher and state senator turned Sierra Club lobbyist.
Climate change impacts are making the business more difficult. Rangeland productivity is threatened by the changing temperatures and precipitation trends, according to the 2024 state climate change impact assessment ordered by the Nebraska Legislature. More intense droughts during the summer growing season could lead to a decline in available and quality forage. This could decrease livestock production and performance. Cattle operations could be further impacted by increased wildfire risks.
Drought has already led ranchers to reduce herd sizes in recent years, which has helped drive up the price of beef, said Elliott Dennis, associate professor of agriculture economics at UNL. Before the fires, some ranchers were likely considering further shrinking their herds — despite steady consumer demand for beef — due to drought conditions. The fires could solidify those decisions for some, which will hit cow-calf producers the hardest in the immediate aftermath, Dennis said. The whole supply chain will eventually be impacted.
This reality will require Nebraska’s cattle industry to adapt and innovate, Twidwell said.
Some of these ideas could include larger scale planning and management, such as using prescribed burns in some areas and making more buildings fire resilient. But these innovations will need to be experimented with and proven with producers, Twidwell cautioned. There won’t be one easy solution.
“Let’s take care of people and get that done, and then let’s keep doing our job and set the stage in the future, given that the game is changing and these wildfire problems are expanding,” Twidwell said. “Ranchers are looking to solve the actual wildfire problem, not just reduce fuels.”
Right now, Wintz is taking it a day at a time and holding out hope that the rain comes.
“The Sandhills are resilient. The grass is there. It just needs a little bit of moisture to pop up and they’ll be back,” Wintz said. “It’s just going to be a different year for me: calving different and haying different, summer range different … you gotta let the land come back, I guess. We need the rain.”
The National Network to End Domestic Violence reported that more than 300 Nebraska children and adults sought refuge in emergency shelters after domestic violence in 2025. To that end, opponents like Sen. Ashlei Spivey suggested that, instead of creating new felonies, lawmakers should focus on supporting mental health or housing services.
“Our policies are only addressing a symptom of the issue,” Spivey said.
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