A Lesson on Flood-Channel Dangers Reaches Students : Drownings: The program is in response to the 1992 death of a Woodland Hills boy in the L.A. River.

Nearly a year after Woodland Hills teen-ager Adam Bischoff drowned in the storm-swollen Los Angeles River, city and county officials on Wednesday unveiled a program for Los Angeles County schools aimed at preventing children from dying in flood-control channels.

The program includes a videotape warning of the dangers of flood-control channels--which have steep, smooth, concrete walls that make escape almost impossible when they fill with rushing rainwater--that will be shown to junior high and high school students, and work sheets and other instructional materials for elementary school students. It also includes forms for students to take home and have signed by their parents, saying that they have discussed flood-channel safety.

The materials were distributed recently to the more than 1,600 schools in Los Angeles County, and to superintendents of school districts in other counties throughout the state.

Officials said the program, funded by a $38,500 grant from the county Department of Public Works, which is responsible for the channels, was initiated in response to Bischoff’s death Feb. 12 of last year.

“A year ago this week, Los Angeles was besieged by major rains and floods,” City Councilwoman Joy Picus, who represents the southwestern San Fernando Valley, said at a news conference at the department’s headquarters.

“All of us watched anxiously as a Los Angeles City Fire Department helicopter plucked people off the tops of their cars in the Sepulveda Basin and out of trees in the basin. Then, later in the week, we agonized over the tragic death of Adam Bischoff as he was swept away in a flood-control channel.

“We all resolved that it wasn’t going to happen again.”

The video was co-produced by Nancy Rigg, a Los Angeles filmmaker whose fiance died in 1980 while trying to save a boy who had fallen into the Los Angeles River near Griffith Park. The 20-minute video, titled “No Way Out,” contains harrowing newsreel footage of flood-channel rescue attempts, stern warnings by firefighters, police and lifeguards, and graphic descriptions of the horror that victims endure.

Carrie Bischoff, Adam’s 19-year-old sister, also appears in the video, reminiscing about her brother and discussing her former ignorance of the dangers of flood channels.

In addition to the education program, the city and county have implemented new, interagency rescue procedures. City and county firefighters and lifeguards have received swift-water rescue training and standardized equipment, and have adopted a routine for communicating during emergencies.

In a wrongful death claim filed last August by Adam’s father, David Bischoff, the lack of such coordinated rescue planning was blamed in part for the teen-ager’s death. The claim, filed with city, county, state and federal agencies, is pending.

But officials said the most important part of their new emergency response routine is educating people to stay away from flood channels in the first place.

“We need to make people aware of the dangers that sometimes are not obvious when there is a flood problem and people come close to these channels,” Supervisor Ed Edelman said.

Despite the publicity surrounding Bischoff’s death, several people have fallen into flood waters during recent storms.

County Fire Chief William Zeason said that in December and January the new swift-water rescue teams responded to 44 emergency calls and pulled six people from rivers, creeks and flood-control channels. Among them was a teen-age boy rescued by firefighters after being swept into an Agoura Hills flood-control channel.

Also last month, a 22-year-old Diamond Bar man died while trying to retrieve his four-wheel drive vehicle, which had become stuck in the Santa Clara River basin near Acton.

Officials said several people have also been spotted in or near flood channels recently with rubber rafts and small surfboards. Using them in flood-control channels is not only dangerous, but illegal, they warned.