Video on Boys’ Drownings Called Possible Lifesaver

A 15-year-old boy shoots down a flooded river channel, his head and flailing arms barely clearing the water. He grasps at lines thrown from a bridge by rescue crews, but with the current raging at 35 mph under heavy rain, the boy misses and hurtles downstream.

Dan Burchfield hopes the videotaped images of the Woodland Hills boy, horrifying as they are, will hit home with local children and keep them away from creeks and streams during the rainy season.

The footage is part of “No Way Out,” a new video that features Burchfield and his wife talking about their own 11-year-old son Joel’s drowning death in the rain-gorged Arroyo Simi last winter.

“It’s pretty graphic,” Burchfield said. “It will make them think twice.”

Burchfield will unveil the tape tonight at a Moorpark City Council meeting. Then the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department, which sponsored the video, will distribute 800 copies to schools throughout Ventura County.

Sgt. Earl Matthews, who helped guide the video’s production, said the tape will be shown to elementary and middle school students, probably starting with third grade.

Younger children, he said, may find portions of the tape hard to watch.

“I don’t want to scare their wits out of them, but I do want to get their attention,” he said. “If they’re not a little bit scared, we’re wasting our time.”

The version of “No Way Out” that will go to local classrooms is actually an update of the tape’s original incarnation, which focused solely on Los Angeles County. Matthews saw the original two years ago at a seminar for search and rescue personnel and obtained a copy.

On the morning that Joel Burchfield’s body was found, Matthews mentioned the video to a volunteer who helped in the search. They watched it together and decided to contact the tape’s producer, Nancy J. Rigg.

Rigg agreed to make a new version of the tape, splicing in video footage of Joel at a baseball camp and shots of the Burchfield family standing by the arroyo and talking about their loss.

The effort cost less than $2,000, Matthews said, but that price doesn’t include donated time and materials. Telecommunications giant GTE, for example, provided editing facilities and master copies for free.

The finished video is 23 minutes long. It opens with Ventura County Sheriff Larry Carpenter warning that even water six inches deep, with enough force behind it, can topple a grown man.

After a few comments from the Burchfields, the tape cuts to Los Angeles County police and firefighters warning about the dangers of local drainage channels, which are designed to move high volumes of water as quickly as possible. As they talk, news footage of water rescue attempts, some successful, some not, runs across the screen. Rescue workers are shown dragging survivors, limp and pale, from the churning muddy current.

Much of the tape centers on the drowning death of 15-year-old Adam Bischoff of Woodland Hills, who in February 1992 was carried 10 miles in the Los Angeles River before drowning.

Matthews said he wants rescue workers to visit local schools and introduce the tape now that Ventura County’s rainy season has begun.

“I think the kids might pay a little more attention if there’s someone there in a different shirt,” he said.

Burchfield said he also hoped that by showing the video at a council meeting, broadcast over cable television, the video will reach parents as well. And he has invited families to the meeting so that parents and children can see the graphic footage together.

“I want them to watch it together, because some of them knew Joel,” he said.