THE CANADIAN PRESS
BENSON LAKE, B.C. - An 84-year-old man who survived four days trapped inside a dry well on Vancouver Island is considering improving his communication system at home to allow people to check up on him more regularly.
Bob Bennett returned to his northern Vancouver Island home at Benson Lake on Thursday afternoon, after spending a night in hospital in nearby Port Hardy, about 500 kilometres northwest of Victoria.
"There's no cell service out there and he doesn't have a phone," said his friend, Barry Christenson, who first alerted police that Bennett was missing.
"I've been trying to talk him into satellite phone now for a couple years. He's got a fax machine in his office he's had there for four years and he still hasn't hooked it up. I get and send faxes for him."
Christenson said he wants Bennett to invest in some form of communication device that allows him to call at night, "just to say, `Had a good day, thanks."'
Christenson said Bennett is the type of person who rejects most new ideas, but after his ordeal at the bottom of the well, he appears to be open to looking at hooking up a telephone.
"He's stubborn, but at least today when I suggested that to him on his way home, he said, `we'll talk about it."'
Bennett told Christenson he wasn't worried about dying in the well, because he knew his friend was coming to visit on Friday.
"He says if I hadn't shown up by Friday, then he didn't think anybody would know where he was," said Christenson. "I said, Bob, `we've got to get a better system out here now."'
Bennett told police he survived by soaking up moisture with a tissue and sucking on it.
Christenson said Bennett had been walking on his property, where he was looking for the well that he fell into.
"It wasn't the Hilton," laughed Christenson.
"He stepped on the wooden cover and it basically disintegrated under him and he fell in and couldn't get out."
Christenson, who lives in nearby Port Hardy, said he sometimes doesn't see his longtime friend for weeks at a time, but Bennett told him earlier that he would be in town within a few days.
"So this just didn't sit right with me that he hadn't shown up."
Christenson went to Bennett's home, where the elderly man lives alone with his dog.
Later that afternoon, a police dog followed Bennett's scent and took his handler to the side of a mountain and the dry well shaft, which is 2-1/2 metres deep and less than a metre wide.
Officers spotted Bennett's legs and at first thought he may have been dead, but then the man started talking. And cracking jokes.
"When we were getting ready to take him out of there, he's going, 'No, no, no,"' Christenson said. "He said, `I just put some soup on and make myself a sandwich, I'll be fine."'
Christenson said he and Bennett became friends through business. He described Bennett as an entrepreneurial type who likes to keep his mind active by tackling new business ventures.
"It gives him a reason to get up," he said.
Bennett worked as an underground miner for much of his life. He worked in mines and road building in British Columbia, but also worked in heavy industry and mines in Afghanistan, China and throughout the United States, including Alaska, Christenson said.
"He says who else but a miner would be so optimistic. He says I never even thought that I wasn't going to get found."
