The most common firefighting tool for decades has been the pulaski, but its namesake would have liked the state-of-the-art electronic communication equipment pampered and repaired at the Boise Interagency Fire Center.
As summer workers crisscross the nation's fire suppression center to speed food, equipment and manpower to the lines of wildfires throughout the West, Bureau of Land Management electronics technician Ken Shurtliff is making sure the firefighters' voices are coming through loud and clear."We're concerned with people's lives," he said. "We need to be absolutely certain that radio works as advertised and we can understand it."
The BIFC electronics staff will check and possibly repair 4,500 hand-held walkie-talkies after each of the six or seven fires they are used on each year. They also will inspect dozens of portable communication stations and repeaters placed on mountain ridges to let one crew know what others are doing.
The electronics were also vital after the disastrous earthquake in Armenia, during the Three Mile Island reactor accident in Pennsylvania and to follow presidential excursions into the back country.
Ed Pulaski could have used Shurtliff's help. In a 1910 fire nicknamed the "Big Blowup," the 16-year Forest Service veteran and 40 of his men were trying to get 10 miles to Wallace in the Idaho Panhandle when they were hit unaware by a fire storm. A former prospector, he led the group into some mining tunnels.
Some firefighters were so frightened by the inferno roaring outside they tried to bolt, but Pulaski pulled out a pistol and ordered them to stay put.
The crew finally emerged from the holes, mildly burned but alive. In recognition, a combination ax and mattock was named after him. And today the pulaski remains the fundamental tool for chopping and scraping a primitive line around the West's wildfires.
But if Pulaski had had one of the new walkie-talkies the size of a card deck, he would have known about the fire storm headed his way.
With the portable satellite dishes Shurtliff repairs, Pulaski could have called a fire command center for help. Or he could have received a fax of a map showing him the quickest way out of the fire's path.
The BIFC staff currently is evaluating a hand-held radio that translates ground communications so fire bosses can speak with pilots and pull their people off the line before an air tanker drops tons of retardant.
The new equipment lets small groups of smokejumpers dropped into the remote back country to catch lightning strikes before they explode tell dispatchers when they complete their mission.
With minute transistors and capacitors, the equipment has shrunk from radios a mule had to carry to ones no larger than belt pagers.
A warehouse at BIFC holds hundreds of fiberglass boxes containing the repeaters, satellite dishes and other communications equipment ready to ship. After a fire is mopped up, they are brought back, inspected and cleaned.
A microscope illuminated with fiber optics is used back at BIFC to reconstruct or repair tiny micro-chip boards. Some of the parts are the size of a pollen grain. But the scope is so strong Shurtliff was able to etch his name on a penny between the pillars on the Lincoln Memorial.
"A broken component may be impossible to see with the naked eye," he said. But with the scope, "If you press just hard enough to scratch the metal, you leave a crater."
The government has added many space-age items to its firefighting armory over four years - infrared aerial night photographs to map the fires by their heat, foam that supplants water in the water-short West, minicomputers to help strategists anticipate fire behavior and tinsel shelters firefighters can crawl into if a runaway blaze swarms over them.