Beauty and the : Caterpillar

Until this year, there were no women riding bulldozers into brush fires in Los Angeles County.

Then, along came Betty Jo Messinger of Lake View Terrace.

Messinger, 29, the only woman bulldozer “swamper” on the county Fire Department, helped fight the fire that burned more than 800 acres north of Saugus in late July. It was her second fire in the year since she began training to be a swamper--a sort of co-pilot for the bulldozer driver.

“I’m like an extra set of eyes for the driver,” she said. She warns the driver of small fires springing up around them, or of things or people in the way.

‘Extra Set of Hands’

She is also an extra set of hands. If a small fire breaks out near the bulldozer, it is the swamper’s job to beat it out. If a fire hose blocks the path, the swamper pulls it over the top of the bulldozer.

Messinger, an eight-year employee of the Fire Department, had a clean, comfortable office job in the maintenance department when she decided she wanted to be a swamper. Her superiors feared that she wasn’t physically strong enough for the job, but she came in on her own time to work on the bulldozer and do chores “because at first they didn’t think I could do any of that,” she said.

Of her first fires, she said: “I wasn’t afraid or anything. It was exciting.”