Brushfire scorches 50 acres
By Gregory Koteles
Acorn Staff Writer

Firefighters quickly douse the fire GREGORY KOTELES/The Acorn ANOTHER SIGN OF THE SEASON--A helicopter unloads water on a blaze in West Hills that was caused by children playing with matches. The pilots reloaded water from a lake in Calabasas to fight the fire. Like football, Labor Day and crowded conditions at schools, fire season has also arrived.

Children playing with matches caused a brushfire in West Hills that burned 50 acres Saturday just west of Valley Circle, according to Bob Collis, a spokesman for Los Angeles City Fire Department. Three fire departments––Los Angeles City and County and Ventura County––responded to the blaze with 41 companies, nearly 300 firefighters, and eight water-dropping helicopters.

Even in the face of this massive response, the blaze burned to within a hundred feet of houses on Welby Way and Castle Peak Lane. No one was injured and no buildings were damaged by the flames, which raged for three hours before the fire departments declared "final knock down" at 5:28 p.m., when the last of the flames were extinguished.

One of the newest tools in the Los Angeles County Fire Department’s arsenal was utilized to battle the brushfire––a Black Hawk helicopter.

The 65-foot-long Sikorsky S-70 helicopter and its variants have served as a mainstay for the U.S. Army since the mid-1970s, and have been used by other branches of the military as well. In fire fighting, it’s capable of dropping 1,000 gallons of water on a fire in a single pass, as opposed to 250-300 gallons carried by other fire-fighting helicopters or the 500 gallons of most fire engines.

"A thousand gallons is a lot of water," said Capt. Rick Godinez, a public information officer for Los Angeles City Fire Department. "They can do in a few seconds what it takes two companies a few minutes to do."

The city of Los Angeles has recently contracted to use an Erickson S-64 Aircrane helitanker, capable of dropping 2,000 gallons of water, in emergencies.

The Aircrane and Black Hawk arrived just in time to meet the threat of Southern California’s fire season, which tends to begin in September with the Santa Ana winds.