Silver Lake goes for the gold!

The LAFD is at it again, and Silver Lake is there to help. No, I don’t have the LAFD blog bookmarked, but I live on the crest of the hill, so the water helicopters fly right over on their way to the lake, uncomfortably close, and so that’s a heads up to me. (Fortunately they’re good fliers, and don’t clip our building.)

Helicopter lowers stinger into Silver Lake to pick up water.

This is the third day this month that the LAFD has used Silver Lake as a source of water for several wildfires, all near the zoo. I’ve lost count at the number of helicopter water pick ups today, but it’s at least 15 as I write this.

It only takes about one or 2 minutes for the heli to load up with water!

The first fire in gp this summer, near the zoo, was on July 27, and I asked Officer Humphreys at the time if they had used slk for water, as they were flying overhead constantly. He said no at first, but conscientiously followed up a couple of days later and said, yes, they did indeed use it. They also used it for the 2nd gp fire on Aug 5, and then today for the fires, suspected to be arson.

It’s pretty smoggy today – almost like Beijing! – so the pictures are smoggy as well – but I think you can see the helicopter as it dips the stinger in the water and slurps it up to go fight another fire. As I wrote last month:

…once a helicopter picks up all that heavy water it has to drop down after it flies up, and so for that reason, they can’t hold as much water picked up from a heliport, [as it can from slk] since it can’t exactly drop down over the school and houses…

This is why it’s so so important for slk to remain an open body of water, as I wrote in May, when I interviewed several LAFD Captains about this issue. (dwp replaced the water in slk within a week of me writing that.)

Unfortunately, Ivanhoe is now a sloshing pit of black leaching plastic balls, which are highly flammable, so that is closed as a source of emergency water. And we’ll have to keep our fingers crossed that the wall that separates Ivanhoe and slk doesn’t break, like in an EARTHQUAKE, God forbid, because then we’d have NO usable emergency water, as the balls flood over to the slk side. (H. David Nahai lives in Benedict Canyon, so thank goodness he’ll be spared any such emergency, and can continue status quo as the leading LAdwp leader.)

Helicopter loaded down with precious water over a very smoggy Glendale. It’s at the top near the branch of the tree.