Meet the Colorado Firefighters on Front Lines of Climate Change

As global warming advances, its impacts are only going to get more personal.

That's one of the takeaways of Unacceptable Risk: Firefighters on the Front Lines of Climate Change, a 2015 short documentary with fascinating parallels to the recent fires that ravaged Fort McMurray, Alberta.

The film was directed by American journalists Ted Wood and Daniel Glick of The Story Group, who've made a business of telling stories about humans adjusting to a warming world.

In the past they've reported on ranchers coping with increasingly extreme weather in Iowa and Texas, and the acidification of oysters in Washington State.

Unacceptable Risk took them to their home state of Colorado, where the wildfires, amped up by global warming and other human pressures, look a lot like Fort Mac's. There, firefighters are facing more frequent and larger fires every year.

"[Fires] are faster moving, more destructive, they're more volatile," reflects Chris O'Brien, a deputy fire chief of 25 years, in the documentary. "There have been fires that have burned downhill over long stretches, which kind of flies in the face of convention."

A recent Tyee story by journalist Ed Struzik about the Fort Mac blaze noted that there isn't a fire expert who doubts that climate change is the main reason wildfires are getting hard to control.

That accords with the experience of firefighters interviewed in Unacceptable Risk. Since the 1970s, Colorado temperatures have climbed almost twice as high as the national average.

"On a day to day basis, we're being surprised," says Don Whittemore, an incident commander of 22 years. "In this business, surprise is what kills people."

Filmmaker Wood said nothing prepared him for capturing video of entire neighbourhoods in flames and firefighters retreating from subdivisions swallowed by firestorms.

He heard the helplessness of commanders over dispatch tapes as they faced fire behaviour they had never seen before.

The filmmakers' goal wasn't to get firefighters to wade into debates of carbon taxes and fossil fuels: they simply wanted firefighters to share what it was like to be on the front lines of climate change.

However, firefighters expressed that the danger citizens are experiencing isn't something that can continue.

"The change in this new environment -- a dry, arid, drought-striken area with lots of fuel -- is we're going to have to change the way we live in it," says battalion chief James Schanel in the film. "That's where we're struggling."

You can watch Unacceptable Risk in its entirety above, courtesy of Wood and Glick of The Story Group, an independent, multimedia journalism company based in Colorado. Find out how to support their work here.