News
PRC Approves Electric Co-op's Variance

Biomass Firm Claims Deal

A Forge-Fired Degree

School Year Starts With Buses Rolling Smoothly

'They Took My Life Savings'

Minors Work at DWI Memorial

Saddle Makes All the Difference

Moriarty Discusses New School

Trustee May Step in for Hibbs

Committee Tackles Canyon Traffic

More
News

HOME	CLASSIFIEDS	OBITUARIES	SPORTS	OPINION

Thursday, April 26, 2007

Bernalillo County Fire Chief Prepares for Retirement

By Lee Ross
Mountain View Telegraph
    Bett Clark says the Bernalillo County Fire Department is in her blood.
    "I've been in this department since 1972," Clark said, referring to her father's firefighting career. "It's who I have become."
    Clark, who grew up and still lives in the East Mountains, can rattle off names of the major fires in Bernalillo County dating back to the 1970s— the Barn Dinner Theater fire, Daisy Mae's, the Raven fire. She knows her department history— even the dates of events from decades past down to the day— and she commands a knowledge of fire department locations, protocols and procedures to make one's head spin.

Click to enlarge

    Now Clark is trying to ease into her coming retirement. With the adrenaline of a firefighter's life, the media attention and community involvement, retirement is a difficult transition, Clark said.
    "You go from always knowing everything in your community ... going to disasters and seeing people on their worst days. And tomorrow you're not doing anything," Clark said.
    She won't actually retire from the position of chief until the end of 2008. The department's plan is to bring in an operations manager— someone to take on the department's duties of emergency preparations, education and fire prevention as well as the department's firefighting and paramedic duties.
    "I hope the next one, that whoever they get will be as hands-on as she was," Tijeras Mayor Gloria Chavez said of Clark's departure. "She was always real helpful. We wish her the best and hope that she'll still come around."
   
Other duties
    With someone to fill the new position, Clark will be free to work on the Insurance Services Office (ISO) rating in the East Mountains and South Valley.
    Home insurance premiums are based, in part, on the area's ISO rating. Clark hopes to improve the rating enough to save the people living in and near the mountains about $800 a year.
    Over the next several months she will meet with water system cooperatives, inspect the firefighting systems at each district, look at communications and computer systems and a number of other items that factor in the rating.
    The last time the area was rated was 1996, and Clark says there have been vast improvements, especially in the East Mountains.
    "We've made some substantial improvements to our abilities to provide service in relation to fire," Bernalillo County Commissioner Michael Brasher said.
    The department has grown and become better able to respond to emergency calls as a result of Clark's work, Brasher said. He added that lowering the fire insurance rating is "critical."
    Working to win a better rating is not just an opportunity for Clark to save her home community a little money, it will also give her a chance to review her seven-year tenure as chief.
    Clarks says her motto is "fire departments should be striving to put themselves out of business," referring to her efforts to decrease the public's need for firefighters.
    Important aspects of accomplishing that job, according to Clark, are education, fire prevention efforts like brush clearing and fast, efficient response.
   
Early start
    Those concepts of firefighting are something Clark learned at a young age.
    Firefighting was a big part of Clark's life growing up. Her East Mountains home was literally a fire dispatch station for her area. At the time there was no 911, so Clark's family had two phone lines, one of them a regular phone and the other, connected to a large bell outside the house, was the seven-digit number used for emergency service in her area.
    When a fire happened, residents would call the special line, which would ring the bell outside.
    Clark said the alarm sometimes went off while her family was at church, prompting her father to take the car and leave the family there.
    "The tones would go off and people would know they had to take the Clarks home," Clark said. "That's where it got in my blood."
    Before landing a paying job with the fire department, Clark worked as an ambulance dispatcher and as a first-responder while paying her dues as a volunteer firefighter.
    By 1989 she was on the payroll as a paramedic firefighter. The position of chief— which she would ultimately take over— was created just one year later.
   
Long-timer
    Before Clark's seven-year tenure— which began as a six-month interim fire chief position in July 2000— no chief had held the position as long.
    Under her leadership the department has increased access to water and water pressure and there are 76 new paid firefighters. The increased staffing allowed existing firefighters to move up, so now each station has one lieutenant and at least three regular firefighters 24 hours a day, every day.
    There are also paramedics at every fire station and an increased number of rescue trucks across all the stations.
    As an example of Clark's department's foresight, she and her staff began working on an emergency management system in July 2001. It was the type of system that became far more common a few months later, after Sept. 11, 2001, when fire departments across the country began developing them.
    Under Clark's command the department also improved 911 service and computer databases, and became faster and more accurate in dispatching fire engines.
    Those are likely the reasons for a decrease in lost property due to fire— almost 20 percent since late 2000, Clark said.
    Clark said she is confident in who she is and what she has done in the department, and she isn't shy about it.
    "I'm passionate about this department and what I do," she said. "I am the chief."