The Los Angeles River is pretty wide.  It’s about 600 feet wide.  Down near the mouth of the river they have a damn.  They call it Low Head Damn.  It is designed to slow the flow of the river down by causing it to recirculate basically, right in that spot.  All of the debris that comes down the river goes over the Low Head Damn.  When the water is really moving and there’s a lot of debris in there, it’s a super dangerous place to be.  I have seen telephone poles pitching end over end in the Low Head Damn actually.  We call it a drowning machine.

            We had actually been deployed as a team to that spot to see if we could rescue this person that somebody thought they saw in the river.  We had set up a tyrolian high line control line system for our inflatable rescue boat and had put that boat on that tether system, being able to control it from both sides, to move it up and down that cross river line.  Then on the backside of that rescue boat, that small inflatable, was a rescue boat that was able to pull the inflatable out of that boil line, that recirculation line.  The idea was to put the rescuer in that boat and put them in the downstream side of the boil line to allow him to get up and grab whatever was in that recirculation, hopefully, a live victim.  Very scary. 

            One of those poles was pitching end over end, not quite as big as a telephone pole, but a pretty big piece of lumber, went through that recirculation and sprung up and whipped into the air and caught the control line that was controlling the boat and started wrapping up the control line.  It started pulling us, the rescue boat and the small inflatable, into the recirculation.  The person in the small inflatable was giving us the hand signal to back up, back up.  This huge log was twisting around this control line and it was pulling all of us into the mess. 

            I was on the bow of our 32’ rescue boat with a line tied around the sampson post to secure that downstream control line.  Well, as we were all pulling I was just thinking what could I do to help.  I was giving the boat operator the signal to back up so he could pull us all back.  It only lasted for just a moment because the log kind of flipped and released the line and we weren’t in trouble any more.  It was a pretty big log that kind of just flipped up, the line flipped out, then it was OK.    

            Right after that happened, this object that these people thought was a person, came over the Low Head Damn, and we could see it.  And we said, there it is, we can see it, that’s the person.  We didn’t know if it was alive or dead, but it looked like a person was coming over the flow.  It went down into the circulation and came right up right where the boat was.  Paul reached in to grab it.  He grabbed it, pulled it up..and it was a pig!  You could hear him scream, “Uuh, it’s a pig!” and let it go.  Evidentally, it was partially decomposed.