Glenn Eldo Bennett Interview
| Hear interview excerpts: | Biographical data |
My name is Jennifer Kern, and I'm happy to be here [July 31, 2001] with Glenn Eldo Bennett, who, I'm hoping, is going to tell us some funny stories about his years as a bus driver for firefighters.
Kern: I welcome you and I thank you very much for coming in. Could you tell us a little bit about yourself, where you grew up?
Bennett: Sure. I grew up in the Los Angeles area, a city called Long Beach, a pretty large city, and I moved out here to attend this university, in the major of engineering physics, which is, I don't think it's even offered anymore. That was in 1970. And so I pretty much had the school bus driving portion of my stay here was—well, it helped me pay for tuition. So I worked one winter for the school bus with the children, and I found out that summer that the buses were leased to the Forest Service for hauling crews of firefighters that were almost exclusively from out of the state, so there was no local equipment to support them. And that's where the school buses now are owned by the school district, at the time were owned by—here's a guy you should interview—a guy named Victor Nackard [phonetic], who owned the school buses, who leased them all out. He's got, I'm sure, several stories.
Kern: Did he also drive buses?
Bennett: No, I don't think so. He may have, but I doubt it.
Kern: How did you get wind of the job as bus driver?
Bennett: Victor Nackard called me at home and said, "We need someone to haul the forest firefighters around, so can you drive them?" So I said okay. At the time it was—well, let's see, you're young enough that you don't know the difference in money—so back then, in, say, '73, I bought a brand new pickup, off the showroom floor, chrome wheels, total top, custom pinstriping, $2,500—a little hard to do today. So at the time they were offering a hundred dollars a day to drive, so that would be the equivalent, I guess if you worked twenty-five days straight, you would own a pickup. So I don't know what that would scale up to, today. I would assume that would be close to a thousand a day. Five hundred? I don't know, how long would it take you to pay off a pickup in a month?
Kern: A pickup? Even though I live in Texas, I don't know what a pickup would cost. I don't know, I own a Mitsubishi Mirage. Why were they paying so well?
Bennett: The Forest Service—I don't know, but they seemed to pay what I thought were very high prices for the equipment they rented. So I really don't know what the buses were leasing for. I know that the water trucks, for an example, people that would have, say, a two-ton water truck were making, oh, I think on the order of $1,500 a day for driver and vehicle. And again, I don't know what the buses were going for. So I think the owner thought, "Wow, I'm getting paid pretty well by the Forest Service, so I'll pass it on to the drivers." Probably could have paid us half as much, and we would have still done it. I thought most of the prices they paid for everything was pretty high.
Kern: At that point, then, did the Forest Service not own any of their own equipment?
Bennett: Well, I think they owned equipment for their local crews, so that the Flagstaff hotshots would have their own bus, and they would have their own equipment and logistics to move them around. But what happened, the reason that we would be called in, there would be more fires than the local hotshots or firefighting crews could handle. So then they would fly them in from Idaho or New Mexico or California were the three big ones. There was some from Oregon. And then they didn't have a way to transport after that—so that's where we came in. And so sometimes there would be as few as one bus to, the largest fire I was on, I think there were eight of us, eight buses.
Kern: eight buses.
Bennett: Yeah.
Kern: So what was your schedule like then, in terms of a day?
Bennett: Well, let's see, the schedule was just—there was no schedule, actually. You would get a phone call, jump down, get on the bus. (takes phone call) The scheduling was, as I recall, jump down there, jump in the bus, and sometimes you would pick them up at the airport in Phoenix, or maybe you would pick them up at—maybe they'd get some transportation to a regional forest or district office, and then you would pick them up and take them to the fire from there. It depended on the fire, too. Some of the fires were twelve on, twelve off. So crews would work for twelve hours, and you'd be there with them. At the end of twelve hours, you'd bring them into camp. And so most of the fires I was on were one bus, one crew.
Kern: And so you weren't just driving the bus to the fire camp, and then they would march into the fire line?
Bennett: Oh, no, sometimes the fire camp was quite a ways away from the active fire, so you would drive them four or five miles or more, and then drop them off. Sometimes you'd stay with them, sometimes you wouldn't. It depended on.... You know, I never did figure out what that depended on. They'd say, "Well, why don't you go back to the camp, and we'll radio in when we need you." Or other times they'd say, "Stay with us."
Kern: So what type of training did you have—especially if you were going into really mountainous areas?
Bennett: None. None. To be a school bus driver at the time in the state of Arizona, you had to take a forty-hour or one-week course, eight hours a day, to learn safety and the driving laws of Arizona, and some first aid—you had to learn some first aid. So you would do that for forty hours, and that was kind of it. Previous to that I had driven tow trucks—also another student job—and in that job I would drive out.... All the four-wheelers here tend to drive out in the mud or snow and stick it. And then you'd go out in a two-wheel-drive tow truck—the one I drove was a 1949, actually, with not four-wheel drive, two-wheel drive. So you kind of learned. You know, you could get stuck actually easier than the four-wheel drives. I kind of learned just going and maybe having to winch myself out once or twice. So really, no training other than I'd been driving the school bus with the kids. At the time, we took that pretty serious. When we were driving the school children around, we didn't fool around. It was pretty careful driving. So I'd had some pretty good experience on how to handle the bus. But—I was going to say not on dirt roads, but there was one part of my route that was a dirt road. It was out at Belmont, if you know where that is.
Kern: Yes, I do.
Bennett: There's a little trailer park out there with an interesting crew of.... No! (laughs) Anyway, so I learned to drive a little bit, but there was no special training. It was just assumed that if you could drive a vehicle—they weren't automatics, they were stick shift. Some of them had what's called a split rear end. And I don't know if you're familiar with that. It's typically shifting, and there's a little cable with a red button that you would pull up or push down, and what that would do would be kind of kick in what would be called a splitter, and that would give you double the forward gears. So they just assumed if you could do that, you could probably drive around anywhere—and that's what we did.
Kern: Did you have a location where you would pick up equipment for the firefighters, or did they carry that with them?
Bennett: They carried all their equipment. Whatever equipment they couldn't carry, then that would be contracted out too. So like the garbage pickup, contracted. All the food service is contracted. So you wouldn't see any equipment.... Like the dozers or things like that would typically be Forest Service equipment. But all the support equipment was all contracted. So it might be a flatbed, where it'd haul in sleeping bags. In fact, that, to me, is what you should name one of your segments, is "Yellow Shirts and Paper Bags," because that's the main thing that I remember of my first fire, was you went out, "Hi, we're the Forest Service. Here, take this yellow shirt, put this on. And here's this big white paper sleeping bag. We want you to sleep in this." "Okay."
Kern: So you would sleep out with the crew as well? You wouldn't take the bus back into town?
Bennett: Oh, no. No, you were with them. But to correct you, yes, I would sleep in the same location, but we always slept on the buses.
Kern: The crews as well, or just the bus drivers?
Bennett: Just the bus drivers. Bus drivers would sleep on the bus.
Kern: And was the crew prohibited from doing that, or they just were....
Bennett: Never asked. I never prohibited anybody from sleeping on the bus, but it wasn't.... Since we were contractors, I wasn't a Forest Service employee, so it was kind of this thing. It would be sort of like you wanting to sleep in the taxi with the taxicab driver. You wouldn't normally do that. You'd say, "Okay, you sleep over there, I'm going to sleep with the rest of my crew here." And that's usually what happened. So…the yellow shirts, I just saw on the news the other night—and you've just been to a fire recently—and they still have the same yellow shirts. Did you see any paper sleeping bags?
Kern: No, I think they actually have eliminated those sleeping bags. They've moved up into an actual bag now.
Bennett: No, no, the paper ones were just terrific.
Kern: Yeah, actually some other folks have talked about terrible stories being really cold situations with the paper sleeping bags…
Bennett: No, actually, no, they were warm, they were good.
Kern: Well, maybe here in the summer in Arizona....
Bennett: During the summer in Arizona—Jacobs Lake got a little chilly in the evenings, but yeah, I can imagine the middle of winter it wouldn't be too good. But no, the equipment hauling was pretty much you just pick them up, they would give you a location, and you would drive to it. As I say, it varied from fire to fire.
Kern: Tell us about maybe an awkward situation with the crew. We'll go through adjectives. How about an awkward story?
Bennett: Well, let's see—awkward? One of the, I think the more awkward situations I had was with a crew from New Mexico. There were two of us bus drivers on this, so there were two crews flown in, two buses. We picked them up in Phoenix. You talked about training: that was my first time having to parallel park a sixty-passenger bus. That was interesting. Anyway, we got through that, we picked up the crews, and they were a little rowdy. We had to kind of keep them from yelling at the tourists. They were actually more trouble—I was younger than them at the time, I was twenty-two at that time—trying to keep these older guys from wolf whistles, cat calls, etc. was exciting. So anyway, that set the tone.
We drove up to Payson. I don't remember the name of the fire—it was twenty-seven years ago—but we drive up, it turns out we had two types of manual shift buses: one was a four-speed, one was a three-speed. Usually the four-speed would walk away from three-speed, but we always stayed together. So it turned out that as we were coming up the hill, pretty close to Payson, my three-speed bus had just the perfect gear ratio to overtake and pass the four-speed, but it was a slow process. So being in the left lane, passing this guy, for minutes, I looked up in my mirror—you know, they had the large mirrors that you can watch everybody—I see my bus is getting kind of nervous—I'm seeing a lot of nervous talking and movement among the crew. Never did find out.
At the time, I had a ponytail, and the guy I was driving with was probably one of the first Hispanics with an Afro haircut. So we had a ponytail guy, the Afro guy, we're driving, we're coming up, we're looking at each other, chuckling, because I'm actually winning for once, and my bus is going nuts. I never did find out—well, I didn't find out until we got into camp that night, I said, "What was the problem?" And they said, "Well, you know, you were passing on a blind curve. You could have killed us."
Well, what the New Mexico guys didn't realize is that in that highway, which is a four-lane highway, if you've ever driven down to Phoenix on I-17, you know that in some places the other two lanes are hundreds of yards away—in fact, disappear behind the cut. And that's what this was. So we were both in two lanes, going up, both our directions; the other two lanes.... So these guys didn't know that, and thought I was passing on a blind curve. So I don't know what they think I am.
Well anyway, we get there, we get called out on the fire the next morning and drive out. We were driving, and it turns out that the dirt road that we're driving on is pretty narrow and has some tight turns. So that means that driving this long vehicle, you kind of find yourself kind of close to the edge. But it wasn't a Pike's Peak thing—it was just a typical gradient that you would see. And we're driving along, and it's getting kind of tight, and all of a sudden I hear this buzzing. And I look up in my mirror, and I see these guys—their names were the Taos Senos [phonetic] was the name of the fire crew—bailing out the emergency exit of my bus—just like paratroopers, just jumping out. (laughter) I wasn't quite ready for that. So these are the same guys that thought I was going to kill them the night before on the two-lane road which was truly a four-lane road. So I had them bail out.
Kern: All of the crew?
Bennett: Oh, probably.... Let's see, there's twenty-man crews at the time, and they had, let's see, the lead and then a liaison and three crew bosses. And I think of those twenty, I think fifteen bailed before I.... Well, I was going probably only two or three miles an hour, because I was comin' around a pretty good curve. So I stopped when I saw them bail, so they wouldn't get hurt, and I said, "Anybody that wants to get off, fine. We're going to go around here, it's going to be okay." So a few of them thought I could get around the curve, and the others that didn't, walked.
Kern: Was it a long way up after that curve?
Bennett: Well, actually it was quite a ways up. But they only walked for maybe ten minutes, because around the curve, I ran into the garbage truck. I shouldn't say [that]. I encountered the garbage truck coming the other way. And so they asked the garbage guy if they could hitch a ride into camp with him. So they felt more comfortable jumping on the back of a two-ton flatbed with trash, than having this guy.... Well, there's no way to turn around, even his shorter truck. So he drove it in reverse the rest of the way into the camp, which was, oh, probably a couple of miles from that point.
So they all left, and the neat thing for me was—that left me alone, to get back out, to clear the road, I ended up having to back the bus around these curves for, oh, three or four miles, because there was no place to turn around. So I got to back that out, and then got out to the main highway. It was an awkward moment, I'd say. I assumed that they would send someone out, you know, pick me up and bring me into the fire camp. Well, I told them I would be right at the intersection of the highway. Several hours passed, and no one came.
Ultimately, an old green GMC pickup came by—beat up, faded paint, with a guy that looked beat up, with faded skin, inside. He stopped, wanted to know what I was doing. I told him "there's a fire." He said, "Oh, yeah, yeah, I saw that. I'm a miner. I've mined mercury here for," I think he told me thirty years. And he said, "Well, you know everybody says if you have water and mercury mixed, it should be bad for ya'. I've been drinkin' it for thirty years." (chuckles) So this guy, who was a miner, had a claim apparently a few miles off; had some water with him. I didn't have any food or water. I didn't actually think about it then, because it was always provided at the camp. So I got a little water from the guy, and he told me, "Oh yeah, there's that fire. You know, that fire is burning right up this little hill. You know, there's no way they can stop it. I'll tell you what's going to happen. It's going to burn up to the top of the hill, you guys are going to pack and leave. You guys'll be out of here day after tomorrow." And that's exactly what did happen. No one stopped the progress of the fire. Of course it didn't spread anywhere, but he was right on the button: day after, we were out of there. And he left me some water, and let's see, I guess I spent the night out there.
Kern: No food? You're waiting at a point where the crew is going to come back?
Bennett: Yeah. So then the next morning a Forest Service truck came by, coming in from the highway, and asked me what I was doing. I told them, "I'm waiting for the crew." You know, I'd seen a couple of other people come through and come out—it was probably tight roads, so it would take you maybe twenty minutes each way to come into the camp and come back. And boy, you know, what seemed like a very short period of time, there was this Forest Service truck barreling down the road, and they jumped out of the truck, and they had, I would say, at least five of these—you know, I don't even remember what they were called. They were cardboard boxes full of what seemed to be Korean-era surplus food. I don't know what it was, but there were these cardboard boxes. So they brought me five meals and six or seven canteens and told me that the guy I talked to coming in was the regional logistics inspector. He was doing a pop inspection. So they didn't do too well on forgetting about the bus driver out at the road. So that was, I guess, an awkward moment.
I did get into the camp at that time, and I saw my—we were talking about the cost of equipment, and I remember they had a guy with essentially a briefcase—a hard briefcase—he opened that up, and plugged into his vehicle, and he had a little antenna, and that was essentially their cell phone. This cell phone that I've got here does more than what—this was, again, twenty-seven years ago—so radio contact. I thought maybe that would be a great way to supplement my student income, would be the radio guy. The radio guy was being paid $2,400 a day for essentially use of a cell phone. But at the time, there were no cell phones, and they were special radio phones. But still, it was....
Kern: Twenty-four hundred dollars a day?!
Bennett: Yeah. That was pretty good. That was essentially one of my pickups a day. (chuckles)
Kern: And he was serving as a link between....
Bennett: It was the cell phone, is what we would call it today. But yes, he was a link between the fire and the district office. The place we were, he was able to get a direct line of sight down to Phoenix. And I wouldn't remember it that well, except for it caught me off guard, the amount of money he was being paid, and his services offered. Now today, it seems trivial, but at the time, those briefcase radios were pretty pricey, and you had to have, I suspect, a license to operate them. So the logistics really just seemed to be very expensive at that time—just a cell phone, the communications. I never did find out what the garbage trucks were making, but I knew what the water trucks were making. Some people were literally making their living by working a few weeks a year. There were rumors of people starting fires. I have no idea if any of those were true—one would hope not. But always rumors about that.
So that fire with the mercury miner predicting just what the fire was going to do—it was right on the button. He must have been eighty at the time.
Kern: So you didn't have a radio? Or you did?
Bennett: We had radios, but again, those days, the way they worked here was that they would use a repeater on Mt. Elden, so they were good for maybe ten miles, maybe a little further. But they were their own special frequency, and nothing that the Forest Service would have access [to]. The buses could communicate to each other, but those days you couldn't just get on the radio and say, "Give me the Payson Control," because there was no Payson Control. We had our own station in Flagstaff, so when we left this area, we could communicate bus-to-bus and that was about it.
Kern: Did you notice how many of the crew members had communication tools, had radios?
Bennett: Yeah. One. I think it was a liaison. He was the liaison. That was another thing that I liked about the crews, was that they had the crew boss, the liaison, and three squad bosses. So out of a team of twenty, twenty percent of the team was management, which I always thought.... You know, you would think maybe.... I don't know, maybe I'm wrong, but it would seem that maybe two guys... (Kern: ... could run the show). So you would have these three squads. Each crew would have three squads of six. Each one had a squad boss, and then you'd have a liaison. The liaison in some cases translated a lot of—a couple of the crews we had, English wasn't the first language. In fact, in some cases, I don't know if it was spoken at all. So the liaison and the crew boss would communicate to the crew whatever we would tell them.
Kern: So after a short fire like that, was the crew kind of dejected about only goin' out there for a couple of days? Were they in good spirits after that short attack?
Bennett: They didn't seem bad at all, because it really—you know, no one was—it seemed in that fire as though it wasn't a real high danger. The contractor for the food did pretty good. It was T-bone steaks every night. So all of that worked out pretty well. The one problem we ran into there was this was July Fourth weekend. There were so many fires in the area that the local—I want to say district ranger—wouldn't release us. They were afraid that if they had another fire in the area, they wouldn't be able to get a crew to respond, because all of the crews were working on other fires. So they held us.
Kern: Where?
Bennett: We went back to the Payson District Office. So the ponytail guy—me—and the Afro guy drove them. We got to the.... [hearse?] within the fence for eight or ten hours a day. You know, it was dry forest, so it was kind of warm. The other driver and I thought that probably we should be in the district office in the air conditioning. In fact, they gave us the supervisor, the top supervisor—whoever he was—was out. I don't know if he was out on another fire or vacation. So his office was free, so they gave us his office. And what we did, we had a little library of books with us, we would read and play chess. And that was how we spent our Fourth of July weekend. The crews, I think even on the Fourth of July, they were out there policing the lawn, while we were inside.
Kern: Oh, so the crew wasn't inside with you—it was just you and the other bus driver?
Bennett: Yeah, the crew never came in. So it seemed disproportionate treatment, but we didn't refuse it. We liked the air conditioning, and we liked the office, and had a pretty good time. So we stayed there for, I think, three or four days. The fires they were worried about were all put out, then we were released, and we took them back down to Phoenix. That was pretty much the end of that story, of that interaction. I can't remember if that was the first or the second fire I went on.
Kern: How about the most frightening fire, the most dangerous fire you were a part of?
Bennett: You know, I think I was really just too oblivious to know whether it was dangerous or not. It seemed as though—I never felt there was a time that the bus was going to, say, get stuck in loose dirt or something, next to a fire. It seemed as though the roads we were on were hard-packed, they weren't muddy—at least on the fires I was on. So I never really felt nervous about it. And the crews that I hauled—now, maybe some of the other drivers got more in the middle. It seemed like we would get on the peripheral of the fire, and drop them off, and they would do their work. It never seemed as though—I never saw any huge stop that we were next to or close to. So maybe the hotshots did, I don't know.
Kern: So for those hours, those times that you actually waited, what would you be doing?
Bennett: Chess and books and magazines. Pretty much that. Sometimes—I went on to another fire at Jacobs Lake. This fire was 1,200 acres, and they had 600 people on it. There were crews from all over the country. It was a huge fire camp. All the other fire camps I went to, it was just a few crews. And here they've got—it almost seemed like a small city. We drove in to Jacobs Lake, and then down towards the rim. It was a clearing, but in this clearing there were (chuckles) there was a bank of, I think I remember that, first, of hot showers. I hadn't seen that at any of the other deals. So here's this hot shower set up, there's a huge dining area set up, covered with not quite a circus tent, but almost. A lot of logistic radios. Just the biggest set-up I'd ever seen. Different crews in different states: some of them were sleeping, some of them were just getting up and going. So again, this was twelve on, twelve off, twelve off.
That fire was different in that we would take the crew to wherever, and they'd send us back to camp. So in that case, we weren't isolated at all. There was eight of us there from Flagstaff. We had some cards, and we found out that there was a—I don't want to say a supply room. I'm not quite sure what the term was, but there was an area that was roped off, that you would just kind of walk up and ask for things, and they'd give them to you. So we asked for a folding table, and they had one. And so we had our little card game going, and that worked out pretty well. It got later in the evening, so we went over and asked them for a Coleman lantern. They gave us a brand new Coleman lantern out of the box. We were talking with the guys handing out the stuff, 'cause they weren't in Forest Service. I asked them where they're from, and the guy said, "I'm a lifer from Florence." So what they had done is gone down to the Florence prison (Kern, inaudible) and gotten volunteers. So I don't know what-all are life sentences here, but this guy seemed like a personable guy, he's probably in his sixties, that's giving me the lantern and telling me, "Oh, yeah, we got to volunteer, it gets us out of the prison, and we can come up here and do this." He'd give you candy bars and whatever. He told me that he was hoping that Caesar Chavez was going to be elected governor, because he was convinced he would get a pardon. I never asked. I don't know if you ask lifers, "Well, what are you in for?" So the lifer was just pleasant as could be, happy to be up there handing out whatever.
Then there were some other people behind the rope, and they had electrical tape and they were taping shovels. I asked them what they were doing. They said, "Well, we sharpen the shovels, and then we put electrical tape so people don't get cut." So a sharper shovel makes the digging go better. And these guys were just like some hitchhikers that walked in and said, "Can we do anything?" "Yeah, you can put tape on the shovel ends." So the Florence guys, the hitchhikers, the Forest Service guys, all the support. We did that for, oh, I guess we were on that one for three or four days again. And the fire went longer, but by that time, they decided that maybe they should mobilize the National Guard. So they brought the National Guard up with those deuce-and-a-half troop carriers, so they could move the firefighters around. So that meant we didn't have anything to do anymore, because they were being hauled by this big truck, instead of this big bus. I guess that was better. So then we all went home from that fire. We had a great time, and never did find out what any of the prisoners were in for, but other than that....
Oh, then there was the.... I guess it wasn't that fire. Another fire, we were just getting women in on the crews. And for some reason, the women that I met were all vegetarians. So they'd look at you and say, "Would you like to trade your baked potato for this T-bone?" So that was sort of the question that you would get at dinner. I don't know why they couldn't ask for more vegetables, but sort of like this was the set-up.
Kern: Going off of that, the women topic: Did you ever notice a little bit of stress or pick up on a little bit of tension when you might have had a woman?
Bennett: The crews that I hauled were all males, and I just ate with one crew that had two women, I believe. They seemed okay, but I didn't spend much time. But it was just brand new. I don't think that there were very many. I think they were just starting to break into that field. It can be pretty—well, as you've seen, you went to one of these fires—did you see what they call the "pisser pack"? Did you see that?
Kern: No, I've never heard of that term, actually.
Bennett: Maybe we'll edit that, but the pisser pack was about a fifty-pound backpack full of water, with a little hose and a little metal—and you would just walk around and press this, and you would get a little bit of water out of it. (sigh) There wasn't too many guys, I felt, that could really carry those around, and not have a lot of problems. But they had some huge guys that would just don these packs, just go out, just start trying to put out little spot fires with them. So I don't know, it's the same thing with the firefighters today, how much weight can a smaller person carry? I don't know. So I don't know. It surprised me, because it was only one fire that I saw one crew that had two women. I probably only went out on (sigh) maybe eight to ten fires, is all, that one summer.
Kern: You did that for one summer then?
Bennett: Yeah.
Kern: Okay. How about some funny stories?
Bennett: I think I'm about tapped out on funny stories. I think the Taos Senos bailing out the emergency door; the chess in the supervisor's office; and the passing and having my bus guys jumping around and never knowing what their problem was, was probably about most of the things that ever happened out there.
Kern: How about maintaining order on the bus? Did you ever have serious issues with any of that?
Bennett: Oh, just down in Phoenix, when the boys would want to moon the women or cat calls, whatever they'd do. I literally pulled over and said, "Look, I can't haul you around if you're going to do this." I've had to talk to the crew boss and say, "We're not going anywhere until you can keep these guys seated, and no screaming, and no heads and arms out the windows." Just like the kids, essentially. The kids were easier to deal with than the crews.
Kern: Did they buckle down after that warning, pretty much?
Bennett: Well, yeah, 'cause (Kern: You wouldn't start.) I told them I wouldn't go anywhere. "If you want to go to the fire, you're going to do what I say on this bus. When you get off of the bus...." I only had to do that with two crews. The other six crews were just fine: get on the bus, ride, go to the fire, put it out, come home. But there was a couple of them I just—they were all older than I was. I just didn't know what was goin' on with them.
Kern: Did you ever contemplate fighting fire yourself?
Bennett: Hm. No, I felt that the bus, at the time, making $100 a day to just drive them there, was probably, I want to say maybe a third again what they were making. So I was making more money for less dangerous and less fatiguing work. In fact, the only thing I did contemplate was being the radio operator at that pay rate. Or what they called the "nurse tanker." Actually, I guess the next year I did drive a nurse tanker for a couple of fires, which was—I think I got $200 a day for that, which was great for me. And what that was, was driving just a two-and-a-half-ton truck with a 1,300-gallon tank on it, and you would fill up the little piss packs. Actually, we wouldn't fill those guys up: we'd fill up their trucks, which would hold—I'm not sure how many hundred gallons those would hold. And they would fill up those little packs. And when your 1,300 gallons was up, you would drive, fill it up, and come back, and read your book some more. It was a great way to—I had a lot of time, so I could pre-study for the classes I was going to take for the next semester. I had those textbooks with me. So that was pretty good. But it was only a couple of times on the nurse tanker.
But the firefighting, to me, looked like a dangerous, in some cases thankless, position. I'm happy that people enjoy doing that, but it didn't look like anything I wanted to do.
Kern: Did any of the firefighters ever ask you, "How much do you make?" That's what I would be asking!
Bennett: No, none of them asked me that, that I can remember.
Kern: Was there ever a little bit of tension because you were kind of waiting around while they were out working hard?
Bennett: I think the only real—I think that's what they were used to. I think the guys that were picking up the gum wrappers in the hundred-degree weather, while I was inside reading books in the air-conditioned office, okay, they weren't the happiest campers. But these were the same guys that jumped out the back of the bus. They weren't too happy. But other than that, I didn't really see anything there. But I just think that some of them seemed—you know, I talked to a few of them and some of them seemed to really enjoy the work, and others just—that was a way to earn a living for their families. That's just what they could do. So no, I didn't find too much tension. I found some of them enjoyed the overtime, and they liked being in a fire more than off fire. Their pay rates were higher. They did work some long hours.
A couple of the crews, one of the crews that was up there at Jacobs Lake, towards the end of it (chuckles) they got the National Guard up right at the end. I think the fire lasted another day. So all those guys drove up, I thought, for nothing. But one crew (chuckles) that I had taken out—again, it was drop them off, come back—and sometimes you'd go pick up another crew. So sometimes they had us pick up a couple of crews, depending. And one crew I picked up, I came out there, and they were all laying back with their arms behind their heads, kind of relaxing. As soon as I got there, they all jumped up (chuckles), they went over to some charred logs, rubbed their hands, rubbed their face and their shirts and everything—'cause they were perfectly clean and looked like they'd had a, essentially, a fairly nice twelve hours, but were embarrassed to go back to the camp. So they literally smeared all this stuff all over their faces and their yellow fire shirts, so they would look good when they got back into camp.
Kern: They'd look rough and worked out, huh?
Bennett: Yeah. But I only saw that once. (chuckles)
Kern: So you did it for about a year, and then the second year you said you were on the nurse tanker. Is there any reason that you didn't keep up with it?
Bennett: Well, it's pretty spotty. You don't know, as a contractor, how many fires there's going to be in a particular season. I had finished school and gone on to be a computer programmer with the U.S. Geological Survey, which I still am today. And that was the profession I wanted to do. So this school bus driving, tow truck driving, driving that was all to get through this university, were just part-time jobs. And so once I got a full-time job, then.... I did do that one nurse tanker thing, I guess, to.... Well, I don't know, I'm not quite sure why I did it. Oh! I do remember. It was a friend of mine who'd gotten ill and asked me if I could drive his truck. It was his nurse tanker. Because I wasn't actively seeking driving at that time, but he knew I wouldn't ruin his truck, and that's how I did it for a couple of days.
Kern: So with your work now that you've been doing, after you graduated NAU, have you ever worked or had a project that related to fire, doing Geological Survey? Or post-fire something?
Bennett: No, no fire work. No. No, the work I do now—well, for example, this afternoon I was working on programs that deal with the geometry of the Casini [phonetic] Mission in its fly-by of Jupiter. So knowing that you get these images back, so at any given point, what's the latitude and longitude of Jupiter from this particular position in time, for that moment in time? That's today. I think later this week I'll be working on the Barelli [phonetic] Encounter, and that's with the Deep Space 1 mission. And so most of the stuff I work on now is planetary geology and image processing. We rectify images, change the [geometry?] projections, and essentially end up with a cartographic product that's used by other scientists to interpret what's going on.
Kern: Do you do a lot of work and collaboration with the Lowell Observatory?
Bennett: The Survey, in general, does. I've done one project on Io. And Io, you may recall, is the only other active body we've found, in that it has erupting volcanoes. And my part on that project was to help map the sulphur content of the surface of Io. And that's a big question: Are the plates flipping over? What's going on, on that surface? And that's a collaboration with Dr. John Spencer, who's been working on Io for quite a number of years.
Kern: So there's no future for you out on the fire line?
Bennett: Well (sigh), probably not. The type of work, it turns out that we've just gotten, the Park Service has gotten a few offices close to us now, and their group is mapping fires with graphical information systems, using ArcInfo. So I can imagine, I can see that we may be working, because what we do is satellite image enhancement. And as I said, cartographic products. That is, we—oh, some people call it "warping"—we rectify and use our geometry programs to come up with an image that is geometrically correct, so I could see with maybe a collaboration on fires now, with satellite imaging, going through some of our image processing programming, to provide more accurate fire data during the fire, actually. And also probably for inventories of just what has happened. And I could see us also working in collaboration in trying to determine the dryness of the vegetation and what type of preparedness would that imply for this particular forest district. You know, "Your area is so dry that maybe you should be alert that this is.... And this other area...." So I could see that as we're looking at more multi-spectral orbiting satellites now, and looking through the spectrum, then I think you can possibly tease out water content, and maybe erosional things, and probably help inventory with the size of burns, for an example.
Kern: And predict, possibly?
Bennett: There's a lot of modeling going on in the Forest Service. Yeah, I'm sure that they're trying to model what's going to happen. Actually, one of the other several jobs I had was working here at the Rocky Mountain Research Center for a summer, gathering data on watershed runoff. So this project was concerned with a burn, what was the yield of water from a burned area, versus a cleared or a logged area. So that provided some early modeling data. Again, that was before this, so that would have been thirty years ago that I did that. So I could still see, there's still a question. Phoenix has come up and said they'd like to clear-cut the Mogollon Rim.
Kern: "Phoenix" being who in Phoenix?
Bennett: The Department of Water Quality has come up and had a town hearing. "We'd like to clear-cut the Mogollon Rim, and we could get more water to Phoenix that way." And that's true.
Kern: Why would that happen? Because the soil would be…
Bennett: Well, yeah, it'd be horrible. We'd have great erosion, and you'd lose top soil. This was something that they came up and proposed, and I don't think there was anybody here in Flagstaff that said, "Yeah, we think that's a great idea! Please clear cut." And in fact, pretty much since then, I think that they've had floods in Phoenix almost every year since then. So I haven't heard too much about that lately.
Yeah, I could certainly see with multi-spectral analysis of these fire areas, certainly plant content, on a large area, so it would cut down.... How many people do we have that can really go off and measure water content in plants? We just don't have enough to go out and really do that. And I could see that with a satellite, doing that.
Kern: So when you say "multi-spectral" what are some of the spectra that you're talking about?
Bennett: Well, multi-spectral would be that you would go from the infrared, through the visible, to the ultraviolet. And the visible light, obviously that's what you and I see. But the infrared and ultraviolet, I think some of the earlier missions were probably mainly concerned with visible. But actually, come to think of it, LANDSAT had some infrared. I think they had two channels of infrared. As electronics have improved—I've been with the image processing for twenty-five years—you would get maybe four or five bands, a red and a green and a blue, maybe you'd put together and you'd get a color image. And then you could maybe get one or two bands of infrared, maybe a little ultraviolet, maybe one band of that, and that'd be it. You'd get maybe seven bands, I think, on the old earth satellite.
But now, we're running missions—I'm trying to remember which one it was—might have been another Jupiter mission—where they had, I believe it was four hundred bands of spectral information. So if you were to take the spectrum and say, "Okay, I'll take one infrared here, another infrared here. I'll take the red, green, blue and one ultraviolet," you'd have seven. Okay, that's one look. If you were to take the same spectrum and break that into 455 separate images, and then be able to ratio or contrast them, you can do a lot more mathematically. So you would see responses of albedo reflection at different wave lengths that may relate to water content. I'm not certain. But I could imagine that that would be—that different water content would have a different reflectivity or a different albedo.
Kern: What's a way this technology could be used while a fire is actually burning?
Bennett: If you had a geo-stationary, something that was always looking at the same area, you could probably, with that, you could delineate where the fire's moving. You could be providing, maybe, real-time where the fire's spreading. And maybe they're doing that all with—again, I haven't worked with them for a number of years—but maybe they're doing that all with conventional aircraft. But I could see a satellite, if you could focus-in on this one area, you could probably see these movements, and see a larger area with just a few images. And maybe you could also pick up, again, this prime spectrum. I'm guessing, I'm not sure that it could be done. Maybe it has been. Again (sigh), most of the work I've done has been on every planet but this one. So we're doing some work, and I've been involved in a little work on here, but.... So maybe that's something. So I could see that as real time, during the fire, being able to provide maybe a larger area—depending on the size of the fire—quickly.
Kern: Right, and then sending that immediately down to the incident managers. (Bennett: Right.) I don't think they actually do that. I'll pass that on.
Okay, I thank you for coming in.
Bennett: Okay. Well, thanks for having me. It's nice talking to you.
Kern: You too.
[END OF INTERVIEW]