High Above the Calm After the Firestorm

In search of flames. . . .

At 4:39 a.m. Thursday, the A-Star, 350 B chopper lifted off from Van Nuys Airport and soon was 600 feet above the city’s carpet of tiny lights twinkling in the pre-dawn darkness.

Promotion-minded broadcasters often give catchy names to their traffic and news choppers. So the name displayed on the side of this one, leased by Fox-owned KTTV-TV Channel 11 from West Coast Helicopters Inc., was Sky Fox.

Sitting to the left of pilot Brad Jensen in front of a small monitor (where Andy was talking to Aunt Bee in a rerun of “The Andy Griffith Show”) was reporter Rod Bernsen, who joined Channel 11 a year and a half ago after more than 17 years with the Los Angeles Police Department. Behind Bernsen, his body secured to the chopper by a safety belt as his legs dangled out an open doorway, was cameraman Vince Mack.

Aimed at Bernsen’s head was the tiny “pencil cam” used for live shots of traffic reporter Suzanne Dunn, the usual third occupant of the chopper with the pilot and cameraman. On their headphones, Bernsen and the others could hear themselves, air traffic control, directions from Channel 11 staff back at the studio and Channel 11’s on-air audio--sometimes simultaneously.

Los Angeles news choppers had been significant during the two weeks of fires that ravaged parts of the Los Angeles area. And this crew had spent hours and hours in the air as a hub of Channel 11’s highly proficient fire coverage.

It was while returning from the initial Lake Sherwood fire, for example, that Mack spotted the Calabasas blaze that would firestorm its way through Topanga Canyon and Malibu all the way to the Pacific. And it was Bernsen who broke the news Wednesday night that the fire had crossed Topanga Canyon and was burning in the direction of the Palisades, a development that caused alarm.

But now relative calm had set in, and at the direction of assignment editor Bob Harmon, Sky Fox was circling above a tiny brush fire in Hollywood, microwaving Mack’s videotape pictures back to the Channel 11 studios. A few water drops from fire-fighting choppers, and the fire was out.

“Quite a contrast, eh, guys?” Bernsen said.

“This was news back in August,” Mack said. “But today, why bother?”

Nonetheless, the Hollywood fire pictures led “Fox News” at 6 a.m. Thursday, with Barbara Schroeder reporting the story from the ground. By that time, following a brief respite back at Van Nuys Airport, Sky Fox was over the Malibu area.

News choppers performed valiantly during the fires. Not only did they shoot back dramatic pictures and steady streams of information to viewers, but they also gave fire-fighting authorities “another pair of eyes,” noted Bernsen, a street reporter pressed into airborne service for this fiery catastrophe.

But on Thursday, Sky Fox had a different primary mission: Beam back pictures, with Bernsen’s live updates on the relative serenity, that could be used to lead the 6 a.m. and 7 a.m. (“Good Day L.A.”) newscasts and to wallpaper the stories of reporters in the field. If possible, dramatic pictures.

*

As gusts of wind periodically poured into the chopper, the view from 600 feet was spectacular, and spectacularly grim. Aside from occasional hot-spot bursts of flame that looked like bonfires, the landscape was an expanse of ashen peaks and canyons that recalled poet Siegfried Sassoon’s words about the killing fields of World War I: “Death’s gray land, drawing no dividends from time’s tomorrows.” Ahead, the Pacific was a smoky blur.

Sky Fox circled slowly. “Is that Pettee at 9 o’clock?” asked Mack, referring to pilot-reporter Bob Pettee in the KNBC-TV Channel 4 chopper above and to the left of Sky Fox in the distance. Below to the right, KCAL-TV Channel 9’s chopper (Sky 9) shot past. KTLA-TV Channel 5’s Skycam 5 was in the air too, along with another chopper that Mack identified as a free-lancer. Yet these were hardly chopper-filled skies.

Wednesday had been much more intense, Bernsen said, with much, much thicker smoke and seven local news choppers flying over the fires, separated at times by perhaps only several hundred yards. And the Santa Ana winds were so powerful at one point, he said, that they caused the chopper to plummet 200 feet in altitude.

But today. . . .

The chopper hovered above two hilltop houses that had survived despite being surrounded by a wall of fire, then “crabbed in” sideways toward what was once a third house, where now stood only a pool, fireplace and charred rubble on a foundation. In a live report later, Bernsen would use these scenes to contrast the fire-resistant construction and brush-cleared surroundings of the surviving houses with the situation at the house destroyed by flames.

*

One of the striking revelations that emerged from last week was the desensitizing impact of relentless fire coverage--the fact that, after awhile, one blaze tends to look like another, and that some of the close-ups were so tightly shot that they looked like logs burning in a fireplace.

“As dramatic as television is, you can’t smell it, you can’t feel it,” Bernsen said, comparing the small-screen experience with actually being in a chopper above an ocean of flames.

Mack said that when he looks through the viewfinder of his camera, “it’s black-and-white, it’s not real. That’s the only way I can maintain some detachment.” Bernsen tried to do the same thing as a cop. “You roll into a (crime) scene and you say, ‘I have no emotional attachment. This is not my mother. This is not my father.’ Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.”

It frequently didn’t work inside the chopper last week. The sights and choking smells of destruction were often overwhelming, Bernsen said.

Sky Fox spent much of the rest of its nearly four hours in the air Thursday chronicling firefighting choppers scooping water from the Pacific and dropping it on the few remaining hot spots in the Malibu and Topanga areas. Mack: “Look at that. Three of ‘em in a row. Bam, bam, bam.” As if watching a battle against a human villain, he added: “It looks like they’re not giving it any quarter. All right, (expletive), you’ve had it!”

It was after 8:30 a.m. when Bernsen informed the control room that the chopper had only 20 minutes of fuel remaining and that there was nothing else to shoot. Sky Fox was ordered back to the airport.

The morning had produced no dramatic pictures. “The control room gets all spooked if they can’t get a fire,” Mack said. In this case, though, bad television equaled good news.