Very Short Video of working at a call

It has been a while! All I can say is it got very busy the last couple of months and a very important relative passed away.

So, back to posting these videos and descriptions.

This very short video was taken in 2002 or 2003 I believe. I was called out to assist on this call since I was by now a supervisor and had a pick up truck instead of a 'dog truck' and carried cages and traps. I took the video at a house in Yucaipa, California, which was (and still is last time I checked on-line) a contract city.
It was the all too common call of too many cats in too small a house and family members were concerned to the point that they too action themselves.
The video is pretty self explanatory as videos go like this, I arrived and the guy was just going to catch and hold the cats. That NEVER worked because the cats would know 'somethin's up' and would scratch and bite to keep the person (or you) from from taking or putting them someplace they DO NOT want to go!
And when we got there we were to try and take 'charge' of the call and try to prevent the people from getting hurt too much. Situations like this one though, also common, were when citizens wanted the problem taken care of without ever going in their house.

Although not in the video, another ACO arrived and also helped take the cats from the house to the trucks. Bad part for the cats like these was that since they were almost all kind of 'wild' and in this case were picked up as "owner release" which meant they would generally be 'toast' as soon as they got to the shelter.

But this was the average kind of call everybody got every week, sometimes several times a week!

Short Video of ACO vehicle accident

Next in order is this short video was from a late day vehicle accident an ACO had been involved in.
Luckily for me, not so much for the girl and unlike some of the other emergencies like this I had to go out to, this happened close by to the San Bernardino office in Colton. Only about 10 minutes away. So my response time was fast.

The call came in that she had been involved and I drove out and had to get off the westbound I-10 and then right back on the east bound lanes of Interstate 10. The clips shows that I saw it and couldn't get to it as the vehicles were at the center divider so I waited until she can get going since her truck wasn't damaged beyond the ability to be driven. She got going and over the radio we talked and said the truck could be driven to the shelter so it could be unloaded. She actually had been heading towards the shelter anyway as it was the end of the day and she was on call that night. So I follow her to the shelter where the rest of the video was taken.

She said and says in the video that she was just driving along in the heavy traffic and the car apparently blows a tire and the driver lost control shooting across the other lanes of traffic and right into the Animal Control Truck. She had recently gotten back this truck, it had been a brand new truck and she had gotten assigned the truck. But then she started having truck problems, breakdowns, accidents, and especially with this accident, she began to say that this truck, a Dodge Ram, must have been "possessed"!

This was just an example of the things I did as a supervisor video. Every time an employee was involved in any kind of accident, incident or injury, a supervisor was supposed to go out and check it out and do any necessary reports. I was out on many injuries, accidents, with trucks backing into things being the most common. I would think that by now the trucks would have back up monitors like many cars have.

I recall meeting up and feeling so sorry for the ACO's injured or bitten. One girl had been used as a escape route for a cat when the cat had worked loose from her control stick and had grabbed her leg and dragged it's way up her leg while she tried to pull the cat away with the control stick. It was pretty bad.

This girl wasn't hurt just shaken up pretty good. She just cleaned out her truck and got another one from the next days supervisor.

August 2001 Multi Agency response in Landers

Next in my videos is this call from August 2001. By now I was a Supervisor since September 2000, and I was asked to go out and respond with many ACO's and the desert supervisor to a multi-agency response for an Illegal kennel in the "low desert".

This kennel had been a problem for months, years!
Well back in the acreage and surrounded by fencing and locked gates, Code Enforcement and other County agencies had been battling the owner for years and were never able to get compliance with all the violations and the area neighbor complaints. Then the owner I knew of, and elderly lady, had to be hospitalized, and the people care taking the property were overwhelmed by the situation and went to the County for "help" and to, they thought anyway, help her; the owner.

So this big response was organized and here it was taking place on a Wednesday, and if there was a choice of the day of the week, Animal Control preferred Wednesdays because that was the 'overlap' day for the shifts and had the most staff working. So employees could be pulled for the day and there was still barely enough for adequate coverage.
I had gotten a "dog truck" from the valley and even the newest field ACO was told to drive out from San Bernardino, over 2 hours away. Stacy with the desert supervisor in her truck and me in the truck I had drove out from the Victorville area, over an hour and half away, we all got up and out early to arrive at the staging area around 8:30 in the morning in Yucca Valley, and then all convoy out to the property.

That is what much of this video is, briefly the arriving and then the driving out to the place. I left it mostly in the video since I had recorded quite a bit of the audio from the service radios in the truck of Sheriff's Dispatch in the Victorville area and of Animal Control's dispatch which was in the office in San Bernardino.

I really wish I had had the money to have the very pricy smaller video cameras that were just coming out back then. Still, I only recorded mostly the drive and not the action because that was the easiest to record with one very large camcorder! So many better and micro small cameras are available in this digital age over what was there in the analog age of only 1o years ago! As I've said in one of these other posts, the ability to have cameras and video is so relatively inexpensive and of so much better quality, were I still in the business I'd have a rolling studio with cameras!

Anyway, as you'll see in the video, after the fairly long drive to the place, we all arrived at the property and the leader Code Enforcement and Sheriff vehicles, loaded with warrants and already researched violations, cut the lock and opened the gates so everybody could get in. Then we drove the winding path to the main "house" and the makeshift animal pens. Every animal on the property was to be impounded and taken away.

As everybody was just starting I quickly walked through showing the bulk of the pens on the property. All the generations of inbred fairly feral and mostly untouchable dogs in all the hot, dusty, pretty poor quality pens for the conditions an owner being one of those "animal lovers"!

The rest of the video shows several of the ACO's in the process of capturing dogs in one of the pens. Those "control sticks" we all had were good things to have I can guarantee, but also could be cumbersome and difficult to use, especially in situations like this with close quarters and hiding areas for the dogs. It took hours to get the dogs mostly caught. I think a few did escape during the day. Then the last seen is of a run to an area shelter were the dogs were taken, over and over during that day.
The overall outcome from all the effort and work to get them all picked up was pretty much wasted after only a few days when the owner had "lawyered up" from the hospital and the county wound up giving most if not all of the surviving dogs back! Quite a few had been euthanized at the shelters for being too sick or too aggressive.

Just a day in the life!

High Desert Cruelty Call- March 2000

In trying to keep the few videos I have in order this one is the next one up.
It was one of those late in the day guaranteed overtime calls on a Saturday, my Friday, night that had to be handled "per the Supervisor".
That usually meant that enough complaints had come in that it could have become a major problem publicity wise. So I got the call.
This property was in the El Mirage area of the county and at least with this kind of call, as long as animals didn't have to get picked up, it was just the one call then home.
I now don't recall if I was carrying the camcorder with me that day or if I had asked Stacy to meet me and bring it with her, but the video was taken with the RCA full size VHS camcorder so it wasn't too easy to carry around in the truck.
The call was many animals, too many actually for the area zoning, and they were not being cared for properly. This usually meant dirty or dilapidated pens or corrals, little or no food and or water, and too much poop build up. And in this case it was a combination of most of them!
We arrived and found that nobody was home at the house on the property and as there was no parameter fence-line we easily drove back to the area of some pens and walked around from there.
While we were there checking out the place a neighbor driving by noticed the animal control trucks and stopped to see what was going on. Nosy or not he was were we got most of the information about the place than we had surmised from checking the property out.

First thing we found was all the pens had no water or the level was so far down the animals couldn't reach it. Even though this was in March in the high desert, animals always needed constant access to clean water. Animals such as the numerous pigs and chickens don't do well with no water around.
We couldn't find a way to get the water system working to get water flowing to the area of the pens. The neighbor when he got there, said that the pump to get it out that far was broken. So we started to haul out five gallon buckets of water using empty containers we found.
As the video shows the pigs went crazy for the water they were so thirsty and I recall refilling their water container several times before there was any water left standing in their pen.

And it was the same story with almost all the animals so it appeared to us that the animals had been without water for a day at least. After we got everything watered then it was go back and take a closer look at the true conditions of the animals.
As the video shows, several horses and a group of the cattle and goats were in pretty bad condition. Most people didn't know, or care, that the sandy desert soil, especially if the animal didn't have much area to walk in or exercise in causes their hooves to grow without any wearing down that would happen in the wild or in other areas of the county. A horse should have hooves checked and trimmed every eight weeks and cattle and goats too if needed. So as you can see in the video, horses with hooves too long and the cattle with their hooves so long it would be close to permanently injuring their feet in several pens.
Then it was all the illegal animals on this property, the fighting roosters, all illegal. You were only allowed to keep up to 5 roosters out there, but roosters kept in the cages that all those were housed were generally only kept for fighting purposes. The number of large livestock, all illegal except for the 9 large animals that would have been allowed to be kept for the size of the property. And ordering a vet and farrier check on all of them? VERY expensive, but that's what the Notice of Violation left on their door at the house said.
An N.O.V. gave a finite amount of time, usually starting at 30 days for something like this, to get going on working on correcting the violations listed on the form.
All told I'm thinking it was about two hours for both myself and Stacy to water and check all the animals at this place. The next workday, Wednesday for me, I turned in the original video to the main office for the "Investigator" to review and check into.
I remember making one check back a few weeks later to see what if anything had been done. Not much except the water was working again to the pens. I got the usual excuses about taking time finding a Vet they afford to come out and on and on. Then the Investigator and Code Enforcement had the ball, I no longer remember if they dropped it or not!
Main thing for me was in July, just a few months later, I got bitten in the head by the Rottweiler on a call in Fontana, got office duty for a few weeks and then got hired on as the new Wednesday to Saturday Shift Supervisor.

Meth House Call- Video

This call, as I say in the video, was day two of a call that began when a fire at an in the middle of nowhere ranch led to the discovery of the meth lab that was there. The Fire Department and the Sheriff's department usually responded to calls like that together, this time it paid off for them. For the owners, not so much.

I had begun to stop leaving the date and time on all the time on the camera. I used to get tired of seeing it in most of the videos on shows of the era like "Funniest Home Videos" so I went to great pains to not show it in our videos. If I had at least jotted down the info that would have been a great alternative!
Now, in going over the videos I have while converting them to DVD, I wish I hadn't omitted the information so much as having that day and date sure would help over a decade later!

Back to the call-
It had begun the day before, a Saturday if I remember correctly (see.... no date!), with me having to bring a horse trailer from the valley to help area officer Suzanne, start the process of picking all the animals up that were on the property. All the residents had been arrested and that was standard procedure back then. If there were no people left or identified as care takers for any animals, they all got impounded and could be later reclaimed at the shelter. In this case all the animals were to be taken two hours away to the Devore Animal Shelter.
So after I made the over two hour drive with the trailer we got busy after finally finding the place, literally out in the middle of nowhere off a power line road near the Harper Dry Lake area North and West of the community of Hinkley, California.
Hinkley was later made kind of (in)famous by the 2000, Julia Roberts film "Erin Brockovich" about the polluted and undrinkable water from the chemical plants in the area and the dumped chemicals getting into the local ground water. Oh, and by the way, that is still happening all these years later too. I saw a few months back that bottled water was being trucked in for the school and residents because the water was so unsafe, still!! I guess luckily for me, I always carried my own 5 gallon cold water container in my truck and NEVER drank the local water while 'out in the field'.
Again, back to the call!-
At the 'ranch' there were a couple of dogs and quite a few horses, chickens, pigs, all kinds of hay and feed for everything too. Suzanne and I loaded up our trucks and the trailer with what we could and took it down to Devore and impounded it all. Since everything at the ranch was in OK shape and with all the food and such there, we made sure everything would be alright overnight and arrangements were made to go back the next day with another ACO, Stacy, and the other larger "stock" trailer the department had at the time to pick up all that was left and still there.
We were to pick up the animals and also take all the hay and feed we could load into the trucks and trailers to help feed all the animals we were taking.
As the video shows and I say, it was another two plus hours out the next morning and we get there and see what's still there to take. Believing that, correctly, some of the possible owners of some of the horses might, after hearing of the bust, might sneak in and take their animals. The property being so far out wasn't under any kind of guard overnight. So anything could have happened.
What we did find though on arrival as I mention was that since the place was going to be a "practice burn" and demolished since it was an illegal drug house, the fire department personnel had come through and 'cleaned out' the place of all kinds of equipment that could be used by the station or by them. Things like several generators, power tools, things like that. The thing that bugged us was the personnel that had large livestock at home had taken every bit of the Hay and horse feed that had been there the night before.
Yes, we would have taken it all too had it been there, we still took all the bagged feed still there, but we wouldn't take it for us. It would have been to take care of all the livestock we were taking.

So we loaded everything we could up. I remember that some chickens may have escaped. That did often happen with those especially if there were many loose, even in a large enclosure, it was very difficult to catch and remove them without a few getting out too. They would be left to fend for themselves because after escape they could never be caught again. In typing this I'm remembering the phrase that one ACO used to say all the time about the "circle of life". Oh well.

I know the video doesn't show any of the work of catching and loaded or even unloading the animals. Most of the video, and I had to trim it to fit the 15 minutes YouTube maximum length, is of the long drive out and the desolate area. I know I remember back then I wanted to be able to show what the area was like to drive and be in. Nice in winter and miserable in Summer, Stacy and I once talked about maybe moving farther 'out' since our area had begun to get crowded, to the Barstow area, NOT Hinkley! We'd also thought about moving to the mountains and the Big Bear area, but that area was already overcrowded, winter and summer!

We thought about it, didn't happen. I really have never been a fan of really hot, like over 110 F (+43 C) in the daytime with a low of 90 F (+32 C) at night. That happens in mid summer in that area due to the lower altitude and distance from any cooling winds like the Phelan area had from the Cajon Pass and the valley that cooled that high desert area down except for a few summer nights each year. Relatively cooler yes, but still often much cooler than out towards Barstow, Dagget and Newberry Springs!

The outcome of the call? Well as I mention in the video, Stacy found paperwork that many of the horses the department had impounded were actually papered and worth a lot of money each. They were all ultimately reclaimed as I recall. I never had to go back out there on any calls so i don't know if the fire department had their burn or not. Probably did though as that was often exactly what happened with drug places like this one was.

So, that's the story of this video!

The Pig Hauler Wreck- Video Memory

Pretty much as Stacy narrates as we were arriving at the beginning of the video, it was during the night of a December 1st, I think in 1991. While we were not 'on-call' that night, it was one of quite a few times that a call had come in that required more than one ACO to handle. In this case it was almost everyone, except for two people, that worked the high desert along with one from the low desert, and a Supervisor that lived in the high desert too.

We had been woken up around midnight or so about this big rig crash on Interstate 40 East of Barstow, California. Up and out in about a half hour to the hour and a half away call, we got there that very early and cold morning.

The truck as you will or have already seen was hauling a large load of pigs to a "Farmer John" processing plant in the Los Angeles area. The story we got when we arrived was that about 11 PM the driver had been reaching to pick up some paperwork somewhere in the truck cab and had drifted off the freeway into the steep center area and when he tried to correct and get back on the freeway it was too late and with the weight of the load and the sandy soil on that steep drop the rig overturned. In the wreck many of the pigs were killed instantly, crushed by the weight of all the other loose pigs in the hauler.
Many were injured, many apparently not injured too badly. In the turn over, the double decker trailer broke open so the ones that could and injured also escaped out into the desert and all around the accident. We were also told that the drivers wife had been a sleep in the sleeper compartment. They were both long gone before we got there. There was speculation that considering that the rig had fallen off from the 'fast lane' that maybe the driver had fallen asleep at the wheel because he should have been in the slow lane or the right of the two lanes going each way.

The California Highway Patrol arrived first, the Barstow station was less than a half hour away, and then the calls went out get people out to round up the escapees and deal with the severely injured survivors.
Animal Control, local ranchers with stock trailers, anybody in the rather isolated area were called out.

I guess luckily for the pigs, even though only temporarily, was the drainage tunnel that was the escape route for many pigs so they didn't have to climb up and be on the freeway, they'd just run through the tunnel and out into the open desert.
First thing was get the pigs! Although not taped we took three or four loads of pigs in our truck and then with the two horse trailer to an area that was set up in the East End of Barstow to hold the 'escapees'. It is no longer there, out of business long before I left, but back then there was the "Wild Horse Truck Stop" and there were also horse corrals set up at the time for some rodeo type activities that used to be staged there.
The CHP and a couple of our ACO's had to shoot the gravely injured pigs that were closest to the scene of the accident. Too many injured and too large to use the drugs that we ACO's carried to deal with severely injured or sick small animals like cats and dogs.
It took hours to catch and transport the pigs. I know that more than a couple of pigs never made it to the temporary storage, thrown in the back of pick up tucks or kept in the trailers of the helpers to become, "the other white meat" for them.
The big rig tow trucks that worked all night to get the rig back up finally were successful a little after sun up.

It was a story on the morning radio news on the Barstow "Highway Station" as well as the Victorville country station we used to listen to at the time, no XM satellite radio for a few years to come back then!
Pretty much everyone that had gone out on this call, since we'd already worked the equivalent of a shift, got to go home and get some sleep. Until the next time!

Video 2 in Chronological order

This video is one of the three I remember being mentioned as having been made for training purposes. This one is geared for "Utility Workers" with the other two being one for Law Enforcement staff and one for Postal Employees.
The footage for this video and the Law Enforcement video were recorded the same day with the same people playing different characters. Many of us "License Checkers" were there for part of the day so they could be the 'actors' or just watch it being made. Since our uniform was basically a Sheriff uniform anyway, someone had borrowed a deputies shirt, they had different shoulder patches, and they just used an ACO badge on that shirt and became the deputy in the video for Law Enforcement. Bullet proof vests weren't worn all the time by police back then as they are now.

In this video, the guy that comes to the door was a field ACO, Dennis, who had actually been off work recovering from a recent motorcycle accident, hence the limp. It was taped at his rental house in San Bernardino. The 'house wife' was played by Sara T., she was also a License Checker and had been hired the same month as I had been back in 1981. And License Checker Danny played the hapless Utility guy who is supposed to be chased by a vicious Great Dane. The dog was borrowed and would not chase anybody! It was take after take to try and get the dog to even look like it was aggressive. One of the final takes was having someone hold the dog in back and then have Danny run and the owner calling the dog. Close enough I guess.

The basic information in the video is actually still the same today for the most part.

The program manager, Pat English, was taped and his voice over done in the basement of the Public Health building in San Bernardino which was were the Audio/Visual section was at the time. The County art department did the cartoon drawings and then it was all edited together. Like I say on the YouTube site, it looks pretty bad by today's standards, a kid could do better nowadays on an old computer, but back in 1982 this was cutting edge stuff. Nobody HAD computers yet! I remember Pat English going on and on about the cost of the "project", his pet project actually since he got to be in the video too.
I do remember some showings being done for and at different groups, but it wasn't long before the tapes were buried in boxes to not see the light of day for over a decade.
When found several of us enjoyed watching the video. By then only one person in the videos still even worked for the department anymore.
I came across this video even years after they had been discovered when cleaning out a storage room in the office for file space. I kept it and am glad I did! It's history!

Till next time, Tad