Firefighters Battle the Infernos of Climate Change | Short Film Showcase

[Music] When you're getting kind of right up close to the fire and really kind of intimate with the fire and you're digging, your head's down and you're scratching, line you're down in the dirt and you're working and sweating and it's hot and it's hard to breathe and you're choking because of the smoke, your eyes are burning and you're just right up against it.

And you look up and there are fire worlds, which are like a tornado of fire literally, and these fire worlds are 6 ft around and they're almost 70 ft tall. They're as tall as a tree. It's just a moment that you're terrified and in awe all at the same time because there's nothing there in your experience to help you to really grasp the gravity of the situation that you're in right then.

"KN out back out, get too, hey back out, back out, back out!" What they are seeing is scary. What they are seeing is not what they're used to at all, and that's terrifying. Colorado used to be considered—we called it the ASA State—because it just was not a significant fire environment State.

And in the last 10 years that significantly changed. In 2010, we had the Fourmile Fire. Within 2 years of the Fourmile Fire, the record for most destructive fires was eclipsed twice and since then it's been eclipsed, I think, two more times. Ten-day fires, four-day fires, three-day fires, that was kind of the norm—not two-week, three-week, two-month.

All summer long we're being confronted and asked to suppress or battle fires that didn't exist 20 years ago. The Hmon Fire from 2002 is, in my opinion, probably one of the best indicators of the impacts of climate change along the Front Range of Colorado. Here we had not seen large plume-dominated fires.

We had what we called "one-day wonders." When it was windy, the fire would grow, but when the wind stopped, the fire would basically go out. Hmon fire was not like that. When we were on the Hmon fire watching, you know, a FEM run through the canopy, and just knowing that that's not what's supposed to happen.

Well, there are many reasons for that; it comes down to talking about drought stress, trees, lack of spring moisture, and higher than normal temperatures. And those combined created and signaled really a shift in the fire environment along the Front Range. We saw fire behavior we haven't seen before and little did we know that was the precursor to what we're seeing today, and it's become the new norm.

"Respond to 71004 M Canyon Drive for trees that are caught on fire." 103, I got a page letting me know there's a new fire start in Four Mile Canyon in Emerson Gulch. I got the page at the same time one of my best friends, Rod Maraga, got the page. I got a page too for the fire and jokingly, you know, said to my wife, "You know, it's the big one," and kind of laughed and said, "I'll see you in an hour," something like that.

And I walked out the door and was like, "Holy smokes, this thing is going to go big." Rod lives there, had a pretty narrow view of the fire, and was focused immediately on how do we put it out. What I think was a microburst just came down on us—probably 30, 40 mph—and that fire just fanned and probably tripled in size within 15 minutes.

The conditions were extreme, and I was very scared. I've never been in a situation before where I've been that surrounded by fire, where we were literally going house to house trying to protect property, trying to save structures. I, at one point, had an engine that was assigned to my crew wanting to turn the assignment down. I was absolutely convinced people were going to die.

Somewhere during the day I started thinking about my house. What was ironic was that I had assigned all the fire engines and there were no more fire engines, so I basically just watched until it hit my house and then I just turned around and left. I didn't really, you know, there was not much else to do.

When we see fuel loads that have increased over time, when we see weather and climatology that has gone to extremes, we don't have a fire season; we have a year-round fire season. And any month of the year is conducive to wildfire.

On October 9th in 2012, I was dispatched to a fire in Rocky Mountain National Park. That right there is an outlier; it's a novel event. Rocky Mountain National Park does not have fires in October. The risk to firefighters was high; the costs were high to suppress the fire against a less than 1% chance that the fire was actually going to do anything.

We decided to back off, let the fire kind of do its own thing for another week or two. A season-ending event would come in and the fire would go out. So, nearly two months later, the fire was still going, and strong winds came up one night and pushed the fire 3 miles in a night—in practically December.

Throughout the night, we're still having active, intense fire; temperatures aren't cooling off as much. I think that the fire environment is changing so dramatically and so dynamically because of our environment in general. There are faster-moving, more destructive, they're more volatile.

There are fires that have burned downhill over long stretches, which kind of flies in the face of convention because fire wants to move uphill. On a day-to-day basis, we're being surprised, and in this business, surprises are what kills people.

From where I live in North Side Colorado Springs, I got a good view right at the fire area. Initially, I was having a hard time grasping what I was looking at. We had a thermal collapse of this convective column; it was superheated air and gas and smoke, and it had enveloped the large area of the community.

I was in a pickup and I started driving up these streets. I was going to roll the window down and when I felt the radiant heat through the glass, I thought, "That's not survivable. If I take a breath of that, that's not survivable. I need to get out of here."

It was chaotic. I was scared to the point of being emotional. I was convinced, yeah, guys would, V—they weren't resources really anymore to me; they were, you know, people. And so we’re going to tell these people, "You, what you know, tell that guy, you know, what, you got a family, don’t you?"

It matters right now; you took an oath going in there. We have a responsibility—the community, we have a responsibility to ourselves, our profession—but at what point does that no longer become viable? Plus, I have this awareness now of what this fire behavior has been for all these years and knowing that where does that cross over into my responsibility to go and send people to do these crazy things?

"Jesus Christ, there it is right here, right here, go!" It's okay, we're out, we're out. When I came into that fire, I thought I was ready for it because of what I'd seen, but the fact of the matter is you're never really ready.

Black Forest made what we were seeing that first night of the Four Mile fire almost look small. Seeing the homes burning in these subdivisions that were already lost, seeing the devastation that had happened, watching the crews moving almost like they were out of their element.

The fire was jumping; it was moving much faster than we could get in front of it. It's like being in a fog bank, only it's all smoke. You can't see the fire. You can hear it; it's out there. You know it's out there somewhere, but you don't see it.

There are lists of rules—kind of rules of engagement—as to how much fire you can put what kind of a resource on, and when you're looking at that much fire, you can't put any kind of a resource on it. That's an "oh" moment.

So that public can't have an expectation anymore that we are going to take firefighters and put them in front of that. It's beyond our capability to manage. We're not going to kill good people trying to save infrastructure that we put in place that probably shouldn't be there.

And so that changing this new environment—dry, arid, drought-stricken area with lots of fuel—is we're going to have to change the way we live in it, and that's where we're struggling.

Is there evidence of climate change in the environment? You have to say yes, because we are seeing a level of fire and an intensity of fire and a risk to firefighters that hasn't existed in the past, and every indicator is every year it just gets worse.

This summer is my 21-year-old daughter's first year on the fire line, and people always ask, "Are you proud?" In one sense, yes, and then in the quiet moments, it scares the crap out of me. In my 20 years, you know, I came close to dying, and you know, I hope that she doesn't have that.

But when I look at the changing fire landscape, yeah, I worry, you know, 'cause I can't tell her what she'll see because she'll see stuff that I'll never see. As a society, we have to take this evidence seriously. We've got to start confronting climate change with the same level of effort and resources and intensity that we do to fight wildland fires. Firefighters are already taking unacceptable risks. [Music]