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Life & Times Transcript

08/09/06

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

It's beautiful, but it can also be treacherous and most of the victims of Kern River rapids are from Los Angeles County.

Sergeant Mike Kirkland>> People look at it and you can see the waters rushing all of its white water. You can feel it pounding the ground and you know, hey, I don't want to get in there. It looks scary. I'm not getting in.

Val Zavala>> And then, it sits atop a scenic hill and is rung only four times a year, but you'll get to hear it.

All this and more tonight on Life and Times.

Announcer>> Life and Times is made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Val Zavala>> It's exciting, it's cool and it's inviting, but it's also deceivingly dangerous. I'm talking about white water rafting and, in particular, the Kern River north of Bakersfield. Every summer, it claims drowning victims and, as Paul Vercammen tells us, most of the victims are from Los Angeles County.

Paul Vercammen>> The seventeen-mile stretch of the lower Kern River northeast of Bakersfield looks so serene. Guided river rafters float downstream, a father-daughter fishing outing, but listen to the Kern River's sound and fury, level four rapids, and hear the warnings of Sergeant Mike Kirkland, the head of the Kern County Search and Rescue Operation. His team plucks out the lucky and the not so lucky from these waters.

Sergeant Mike Kirkland>> There's a deep channel out there. The water goes really fast and, when you get caught in that, if you don't know what you're doing, you're going to get washed down. You're going to end up in trouble.

Paul Vercammen>> The warning signs spell out trouble to visitors at the mouth of the narrow Kern River canyon. Almost two hundred forty lives lost since 1968. In the past two years, seventeen people drowned in the Kern, ten of the victims from Los Angeles County, and the Search and Rescue crews also pulled from the Kern another ninety people who lived to tell about their ordeals. They estimate that half of the rescued people drove up from Los Angeles County.

On this summer day, the temperature along parts of the Kern River is a throat-scorching hundred eight degrees. Throughout the summer in parts of Los Angeles, the temperatures have soared above a hundred. All this adds up to make the Kern a cool river of temptation.

Sergeant Mike Kirkland>> It's a very inviting place to stop. There's good parking. It's easy access to get down to the water and, on a hot day, you just want to get in the water and cool off and they get caught by surprise.

Paul Vercammen>> What's catching swimmers off-guard? Ignorance about the strength of the river's current and underwater barriers.

Sergeant Mike Kirkland>> It's all over the river, what we call strainers, where there's either rocks or roots or tree limbs or sometimes it's just a lot of debris that's washed down and gotten stuck somewhere.

Paul Vercammen>> And the strainers' rocks and debris trap people. Even strong swimmers can't extract themselves from the raw power of the Kern's current against their bodies.

Sergeant Mike Kirkland>> The force of the water, you would have to be able to lift with your arms or legs or wherever the water's got you trapped, you'd have to be able to lift about six hundred pounds.

Paul Vercammen>> The drowning victims range from daring expert swimmers to drunken dog-paddlers. Flimsy rafts and inner tubes cannot head off disaster. Kirkland cringed as he ran into this group of buddies getting ready to launch.

Sergeant Mike Kirkland>> "Are you going to go in right here?"

>> "Yeah, we're thinking about it."

Sergeant Mike Kirkland>> "Have you ever done this stretch before?"

>> "Yeah, several times."

Sergeant Mike Kirkland>> "Then you know what I'm talking about. It's dangerous."

>> "Yep."

Sergeant Mike Kirkland>> "Nobody has a life vest?"

>> "Life vest (laughter)?"

Sergeant Mike Kirkland>> "Yeah, a vest. It'll keep you alive."

Paul Vercammen>> These four friends from Los Angeles County begin their trek. There may be questions from that particular inner tube.

Sergeant Mike Kirkland>> All of them. They're all exactly the same. They're real thin vinyl. When you open the package, it will say right on it "Not to be used as a personal flotation device. Don't let this be your only means of support in the water."

Paul Vercammen>> We caught up with the floaters downstream.

Steve Seem>> Well, it's smooth, it's cool, a relaxing way to beat the heat and it's a nice entertainment.

Jerry Hamilton>> You go from Sandy Flats to here, it's fairly smooth. You go from here to down there, you're into white water and you should not even be there.

Paul Vercammen>> So you've seen the aftermath of some of these rescues or even the search for the bodies after drowning?

Jerry Hamilton>> Last year when we went home, they were fishing some guys out of a kayak down in the rapids down there, him and his wife and his dog, and they were all three killed. You shouldn't be in places where you shouldn't be.

Steve Seem>> We're good at it. Yeah, we've been doing it for years. We don't take any unnecessary risks. We float down the middle of the river and stay away from the trees and we don't hit anything that we can't, you know (laughter), get out of.

Paul Vercammen>> But Sergeant Kirkland stresses that many river visitors think they're safe, but their attempted precautions may actually set them up for disaster. Kirkland recalls that a child floating on an inner tube like this tethered to a tree got swept away and drowned. The unyielding Kern current snapped the rope off the inner tube's grommets.

Lee Bluxom>> The officer told us about the fact that you're actually tethered exactly the same, so, yeah, instead of relying on the grommets, we would strap the tubes together.

Dodie Namey>> Well, I would feel a lot safer probably securing them better. I mean, we have her in a life vest and we took the rope and all that just because of that. So, you know, I'd like to take any precaution that we needed to and not take any chances.

Paul Vercammen>> Taking a guided tour in life vests has proven to be the safest way to ride the Kern. There's been just one drowning on a guided tour that anyone can remember in about four decades.

Sergeant Mike Kirkland>> Professional rafting companies do a fine job up here showing people the Kern River, giving them the excitement of river rafting. The people that are out here on their own are the people that get in trouble.

Sean Larkin>> Well, if they're anytime in the water over their ankles, they really should be in a life jacket. That's one of the big things. Another thing you see a lot is people stringing ropes up across the river thinking it's safety. It's a pretty dangerous thing. Really, truly, you've got to be careful of the Kern, especially with young kids.

Paul Vercammen>> The current rumbles out of Lake Isabella. The Army Corps of Engineers has released more water from the dam than usual in part because of the heavy snow melt in the mountains above.

Sergeant Mike Kirkland>> It's flowing at about twenty-one or twenty-two hundred cubic feet a second. That's cubic feet of water past the single point on the river every second.

Paul Vercammen>> And it's deceptive, flowing just as fast in peaceful looking wide stretches as in churning white water. Earlier in the year, the Kern flowed twice as fast, but that often helps Search and Rescue crews because turbulent water scares off many swimmers.

Sergeant Mike Kirkland>> People look at it and you can see the waters rushing all of its white water. You can feel it pounding the ground and you know, hey, I don't want to get in there. It looks scary. I'm not getting in.

Paul Vercammen>> And Kirkland wants more people in Los Angeles County to fear this river.

Sergeant Mike Kirkland>> I think we're kind of far removed from Los Angeles, but a lot of the people that come up here are from Los Angeles like we talked about. It's been really frustrating trying to get the word out to those people.

Paul Vercammen>> The stories of the Kern wind up on the nightly news in Bakersfield, but not two and a half hours away.

Sergeant Mike Kirkland>> Well, it's really hard to get air time in Los Angeles. There's a lot more going on down there, I guess, and maybe the river's not that important there.

Paul Vercammen>> And another challenge is communicating to Spanish speakers. Kirkland believes that the Spanish language news media in Los Angeles could help spread the word of the Kern's dangers because so many drowning victims spoke little or limited English.

Sergeant Mike Kirkland>> If they're reading Spanish newspapers and only watching the Spanish television programs, then we need to try to get into that market for the news and put our warnings out over that media.

Paul Vercammen>> Perhaps the ultimate Kern River cautionary tale spills out in song.

Merle Haggard>> "Why I'll never swim Kern River again. It was there I first met her and it was there that I lost my best friend."

Paul Vercammen>> Country legend, Merle Haggard, sung about the perils of this waterway in his 1985 hit, "Kern River". Of the seventeen most recent drowning victims, eight bodies remain missing.

Sergeant Mike Kirkland>> It is heartbreaking. That's the hardest part of the job.

Paul Vercammen>> Those victims swallowed up and entombed. The Kern River instantly seduces so many southern Californians with her beauty only to capture them forever with her brutal force.

Merle Haggard>> "I may drown in still water, but I'll never swim Kern River again."

Paul Vercammen>> I'm Paul Vercammen for Life and Times.

Announcer>> Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and Times. You'll find previews of upcoming stories, plus transcripts and audio of past episodes and links to some of our most interesting features. Just go to kcet.org, scroll down the page and click on "Life and Times".

Toni Guinyard>> Take a look at the rising gas prices. They increase almost daily, but have you wondered why? It seems everyone has an explanation. So we spent some time with the President of the Western States Petroleum Association and asked him why is it costing us so much to "fill 'er up"?

Joe Sparano>> Most of the reason involves the cost of crude. In the last year, crude is up almost thirty-eight to forty percent, even more now with yesterday's increase. Crude represents, according to the Energy Information Administration, fifty-five to sixty-five percent of the price of a gallon of gasoline.

We have some of the highest taxes in the country here. Sixty cents a gallon or more makes us third in the country in terms of gasoline tax at the pump. And we have a very special blend of gasoline that burns cleaner than anywhere in the world. Our own Air Resources Board has said that costs five to fifteen cents a gallon more. Maybe overall in time, the most important reason is supply and demand.

Toni Guinyard>> It's hard to sell the public on this argument because everyone is opening the newspaper and reading that oil companies are making record profits. How do you explain that?

Joe Sparano>> The profits that are identified on television, for example, in the fourth quarter, Exxon made a very large profit and everybody's written about it. However, when you look at their profit on an earnings per dollar of revenue, it was about 9.7 percent. If you look at the whole industry, it was 8.9 percent. All industry in the United States, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers, averages 6.3 percent, so, yes, it was a little bit higher.

These are huge companies. They bring in large revenues, but where does it go? A good question to ask. Owners of these big oil companies, publicly traded companies, forty-one percent of them are either public or private pensions. Pension funds in the state or IRAs, other private pension funds from private industries, they are some of the largest groups of owners of these companies.

Finally, the companies reinvest the money. In the last twelve years, only twice has earnings even matched the amount of money reinvested in the business. The last three years in America our companies invested in exploration, production, refining and marketing a hundred twenty billion last year. Over a hundred billion in 2004. This year, the projection is a hundred twenty-five billion just in the United States.

Toni Guinyard>> The numbers are big and the numbers are impressive, but to someone who cannot afford to fill up their tank to go from point A to point B, they don't care.

Joe Sparano>> Right.

Toni Guinyard>> That's the reality of it. So how does your industry speak to the public in that sense? What do you tell us when we're struggling to make ends meet to begin with?

Joe Sparano>> It's a very difficult problem and very difficult to explain. The consumer doesn't care what the inflation-adjusted price for gasoline was twenty-five years ago, which was higher than now. You drive up to a pump and it says a certain number. It may strap your budget. There are no easy short-term fixes and I won't try to present them as though there were. We have a twenty-five year in the making problem.

Public policy is a big issue. We have not been allowed to drill in spots in this country. Interesting fact, on federal lands alone, there are six hundred thirty-five trillion known cubic feet of gas. That's enough to heat every one of the sixty million homes in America that use natural gas for a hundred twenty years. We can't touch that.

Toni Guinyard>> Are you saying that this is an issue of environmental versus --

Joe Sparano>> -- I don't think you have to trade off or do one or the other, but there have been some public policy decisions about where we can drill, about the ability to add refining capacity. We haven't built one in California in thirty-seven years. In the United States, it's been thirty years. Those are problems that put us behind the curve on supply and demand.

When you couple that with worldwide tension in Iran, Nigeria, Venezuela, super growing demand in China and India and even in the United States, our economy has been good for years. We have been demanding more and more each day. We use almost twenty-one million barrels a day of product. To make that product, we import thirteen. That's about sixty-three percent.

All of those factors make it very difficult for that price to stay steady. When there are disruptions, there is a reaction in the marketplace. What I can urge consumers to do is two or three things. Number one, pick the lowest price. There are ninety-five hundred stations in California and some of them have lower prices than others and you should buy the lowest price gas. If your car can run on eighty-seven octane, don't buy ninety-one.

Keep your tires inflated. AAA has a marvelous set of tips for short-term. In the longer term, people will have to decide whether the kind of prices we've been seeing motivate them to buy SUVs or Priuses. Hybrid cars are wonderful, a great invention. There aren't a lot of them available.

Toni Guinyard>> Why is there such a difference in price from one station to the next, from one neighborhood to the next?

Joe Sparano>> There are a number of reasons. One is just the local supply and demand conditions. If there's a tremendous demand in an area for whatever reason, the prices are likely to go up. That's our capitalist system. When demand exceeds supply, prices go up. But if you want to look in a neighborhood, companies have different pricing practices.

Companies that don't use credit cards can offer their customers a lower price because they pay less of a fee to run their station. Every station has operating costs and some of them are different. Fuel deliveries come at different times and are priced differently, so companies have a bit of flexibility. But by and large, the same set of supply and demand factors in California, that really narrow margin between what we make and what consumers demand and what we ship out of state, is what really sets the price.

The final thing is the concentration of stations. If you live in a neighborhood that has five stations in a five square mile area, they don't have to be nearly as competitive as if you live in a neighborhood that has twenty-five stations in the same five square mile area. They're fighting each other for the customers. It's a finite number of customers.

Toni Guinyard>> Convince me that consumers aren't being gouged at the pump, that we aren't being victimized by those people who set the prices for gasoline.

Joe Sparano>> There have been thirty studies in the last twenty years by everyone from the Federal Trade Commission to our own Attorney General, to Attorneys General in more than twenty states, the California Energy Commission, the Justice Department.

Just about anybody and everybody who could investigate prices has done so and not once, not one investigation in those twenty years that they've taken place, has ever turned up any evidence of wrongdoing. No evidence of what you talked about, no price gouging, no collusion. None of that happens and it's been proven over and over again.

People mistake the angst they feel over prices which is real for somebody doing something to create that. It's the market. We live in a market driven by supply and demand factors. It is those market factors, not company practices or pricing activities, that cause the price of gasoline to move the way it does.

Toni Guinyard>> Joe Sparano, President of the Western States Petroleum Association, it is getting noisy up here, so I'll end the interview. Thank you for spending some time with Life and Times.

Joe Sparano>> Thank you very much, Toni.

Announcer>> To send a comment or a question to our program, you can reach us by mail at this address:

Life and Times
4401 Sunset Blvd.
Los Angeles, California 90027

You can also call our viewer comment line (323) 953-5555) or contact us the fast way by e-mail at kcet.org.

Val Zavala>> If you think it takes patience to teach your dog to roll over, imagine how you teach birds to perform in front of a live audience. Well, the Los Angeles Zoo has done it and we thought we'd take our camera there to get a behind-the-scenes look at how they get our feathered friends to cooperate.

John Guenther>> My name is John Guenther and I've been in charge of the bird show here for about seven years. I've been at the zoo for almost ten. I've got the greatest job.

[Film Clip]

John Guenther>> We have people coming to the show just hoping that they're in the show that the condor is going to be at, so it's pretty impressive and it gives -- you know, if we could do something that really impresses the audience and the kids, that they take away with them and remember, you know, that's what we're after.

[Film Clip]

John Guenther>> I can remember being a child, being at a bird show, and going up afterwards and talking to the guy that has just flown his Prairie Falcon and in just awe, you know. Now to have that role be reversed for me, I feel very fortunate.

[Film Clip]

John Guenther>> The raven routine is a great example of a routine that just allows us to demonstrate the intelligence of a raven being the smartest bird in the world and also give the children a chance to come up on stage and interact and be a part of demonstrating how smart these ravens are.

>> "Okay, Alex. You find a good hiding place, whichever side you want. Tuck it way back into the bushes where we can't see it because, if we can see it, then Blackjack for sure can see it. Oh, he's looking for it, Alex. I don't know. I think he may have spotted it. He's got it. There's no stumping him."

John Guenther>> Cheeks is our Goffin cockatoo and she's been doing the show for so long.

>> "I need the help of an adult volunteer with a dollar bill."

John Guenther>> She gets a dollar from one of the audience members.

>> "Keep your arm nice and level for me. Most importantly, for this whole routine, keep your eyes on me. All right. Everyone else, please keep your hands in your laps and your eyes focused on top of the temple. Appearing will be Cheeks, our Goffin cockatoo."

[Film Clip]

>> "Grab the cash, Cheeks. What do you do with it? Thank you. You enjoy the rest of the show (laughter). I need an adult volunteer with a twenty dollar bill who would like to work with . . ."

John Guenther>> Learning about some of the natural behaviors that these birds possess just gives you a greater appreciation for how unique they all are.

>> "All the way back up to Mimi. Thank you very much for helping us out. One more time, folks. That's Cheeks, our Goffin cockatoo."

John Guenther>> We can all go home and realize that we're not on this planet by ourselves and that we do have to share it and, hopefully for generations to come, this planet will still be here for the wildlife as well as ourselves.

[Film Clip]

>> "And beautifully done."

Val Zavala>> It's a stunning gift from overseas given to the United States on its two hundredth birthday. Yet most Angelenos don't even know it's there, maybe because it's only rung four times a year. It sits on a hill with one of the most magnificent views of the Pacific and all of southern California. Stately and elegant, it's a touch of Korea right here in San Pedro.

This is the Korean Friendship Bell in Angels Gate Park, a stunning twelve foot bell under an elaborate pagoda. The bell was a gift of the Republic of Korea to the United States on America's two hundredth birthday. I talked with Steve Cho from the California State Military Reserves and Phil Orland with the City Parks and Recreation Department about this unusual gift.

Steve Cho>> I think this facility is to have not only friendship, but keep our freedom throughout the world.

Phillip Orland>> It's a symbol of freedom, it's a symbol of friendship and, you know, just like the Liberty Bell.

Steve Cho>> They wanted to have Statue of Liberty and statue of oppression. There is big philosophy in the bell, whoever designed it. I mean, I wasn't involved, but this is what it is.

Val Zavala>> The bell was made in Korea, patterned after a bell cast back in 771 by King Seongdeok. Not since the eighth century had such a large bell been cast in Korea. The seventeen-ton bell was then shipped across the ocean along with more than thirty Korean craftsmen. For six months, they lived and worked at Port MacArthur in Angels Gate Park building the pagoda that would house the bell.

Steve Cho>> Back in 1976, we had about a four thousand audience at the dedication event. Back in 2002, the first anniversary of 9/11, we commemorated those people that were lost, so we had a big event here.

Val Zavala>> A ceremonial ringing of the bell only happens four times a year.

Phillip Orland>> One is Fourth of July, one is New Years Eve, one is Korean Independence Day and then the Daughters of the American Revolution have a ceremony for Constitution Day.

Val Zavala>> We were lucky. They made an exception for us and, in a moment, you'll get to hear what the twelve-foot, seventeen-ton Friendship Bell sounds like. The bell doesn't have a clapper. Instead, it is struck by a large wooden log. The bowl underneath the bell and the opening at the top create a reverberating sound that they say can be heard over a wide area and lasts for several minutes.

Steve Cho>> And whoever rings, they have white gloves. Only white gloves. That's a tradition. So three people on one side, three people one side. The reason I limit that to three is because we don't want somebody to get caught in fingers and get hurt.

Val Zavala>> We all got in place for the big moment.

Steve Cho>> Are you ready? Okay, this is what we're going to do. One, two, ---, now we shake hands like that (laughter).

Val Zavala>> Oh, that's the friendship (laughter).

Steve Cho>> So we have three Korean community leaders, three Los Angeles citizens, to symbolize.

Val Zavala>> I can feel it still going.

Steve Cho>> Oh, yeah.

>> It's still resonating.

Val Zavala>> I could feel the deep vibrations still resonating in the metal.

[Film Clip]

Val Zavala>> Los Angeles was chosen as the site of the Friendship Bell because it is the gateway to the Pacific and home of the largest Korean community in the United States. Steve Cho hopes it will become as well known on the west coast as the Statue of Liberty is on the east coast.

Steve Cho>> This is not only for friendship. It's for everything. Peace, freedom, such as we stand strong to maintain our culture strong and keep the peace in the rest of the world. I think that's what it is.

[Film Clip]

Val Zavala>> The next official ringing of the Korean Friendship Bell will be August 15 on Korean Independence Day. For more information, you can go to sanpedro.com.

And that's our program. I'm Val Zavala. For everyone at Life and Times, thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

Announcer>> Life and Times was made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Sponsored in part by:


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