69 Bravo and the Chinook 47 - The World's Top Fire Fighting Supply Station!

A giant Chinook CH-47, the world's largest firefighting chopper, goes through maneuvers over the world's most advanced helitanker refilling base right at the top of Topanga Canyon. This is 69 Bravo, the only source of thousands of gallons of water between Encino and the Pacific Ocean. Thirty-four acres transformed into an automated water supply station for firefighting helicopters and an answer to prayer for the 30,000 people who live below in the Santa Monica Mountain communities of Topanga, Malibu, Calabasas and the Palisades where wildfire is inevitable. It's a question of when. From the middle of Topanga Canyon, it could take an hour and a half for that fire to go. Wind-driven fire racing four miles in an hour and a half. L.A. County Fire Assistant Chief Drew Smith says when you do the math, you quickly see it's a deadly equation because with one road in and one road out, it would take four times that long to evacuate the thousands of people in the firestorm's path. But the key to everything is keeping the fire small. Small, three to five acres, bigger than that, and Smith says the chances of stopping it are slim. So attacking it from the air within minutes is the best hope of saving lives. At 69 Bravo, L.A. County's Firehawk helicopters can suck up 1,000 gallons of water, drop it on a fire within a five-mile radius, and be back refilling in under five minutes, an unheard-of turnaround time. Oh, and those four huge tanks, they call them pumpkins, immediately refill themselves. A fully automated system. There's nothing like that in the world, and there's nothing to even come close to compare it to. Pilot Mel Sacanti should know. He fights fires all around the world. He says an elevation of 2,400 feet means 69 Bravo is higher than any potential fire, turning his chopper into a life-saving dive bomber. Coming out of there fully loaded and going downhill, your airspeed is immediately doubled, a lot less power coming downhill, which means a lot less fuel burn, which means we can stay on scene and fight the fire longer. All four pumpkins are connected to a 25,000-gallon storage tank just uphill. As soon as a Firehawk sucks water from any one of them, the automation program inside 69 Bravo's control center opens a valve, and gravity-fed water rushes in to top it off. When the supply tank runs low, a county water line kicks in to refill it. And because those pumpkins are so big, even the behemoth Chinook's 3,000-gallon thirst can't drain them dry. And even the smallest detail is covered. For example, when hovering to refill, helicopter rotors kick up debris that can damage an aircraft's engines and obscure a pilot's vision. To prevent that, at conventional refill sites, firefighters with water trucks are needed to soak the ground. But remember, 69 Bravo's designed to run without a human on the property. So, sprinklers, activated by an app on the pilot's cell phone. Being the fact that I can be 20 minutes out, pull up my iPhone, and turn on the sprinklers. I mean, you take all of the things that we worry about as aviators out of the equation. I don't need ground support equipment, I don't need somebody on the ground with a radio. It's a secure facility. It can be done there at night. That's a first in the world. There's not that set up anywhere else, anywhere. By now, you may be wondering, who did all this? Well, the landowner says he's just a private citizen who'd like to keep it that way. What may be more amazing than what he's created, though, is the fact that L.A. County Supervisor Sheila Kuhl and County Fire Chief Daryl Osby immediately saw 69 Bravo's value. And they struck an unbelievable deal for the county to buy it. Everything turnkey. The county's making seven annual payments totaling less than half the property's market value. Not just saving taxpayers money, but saving homes and lives. And the county has already made more than half those payments, now fully invested, knowing that in 2024, 69 Bravo will become one of L.A. County Fire's most valuable assets. Second, of course, to its firefighters, who are as thankful as homeowners that they have a 50,000-gallon Guardian Angel watching over them.