Gizmodo Australia » los angeles

Five Shocking Time-Lapse Videos Of The Los Angeles Wildfire

Sean Fallon — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 01:00:00 +0000

After 11 days, Firefighters believe they have finally made progress battling the arson fire that has ravaged 148,258 acres of Angeles National Forest. That is a herculean feat, as these frighting time-lapse videos illustrate.

In a town so tied into the film industry, it isn’t surprising that local filmmakers would turn their cameras on the fire—showing us all just how fast a small flame can rage into something so utterly devastating. Check out Fast Company for the rest of the videos. [Fast Company and Yahoo]

LA Smouldering From Space

Matt Buchanan — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 15:40:00 +0000

The LA fires have actually exploded to double the 245 kilometres they cover in this photo taken Sunday morning by NASA’s Terra satellite. I imagine this is sort of what LA will look like from space mid-apocalypse. [NASA via BoingBoing]

400,000 Bouncy Black Balls Invade Reservoir to Stop Carcinogen

Gizmodo US Edition — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 22:45:00 +0000

While yesterday the world was ogling over the iPhone 3G black body, some people were just awing over black balls. 400,000 of them. Black balls everywhere, bouncing, swinging, cavorting, happily hopping down the side of the Ivanhoe Reservoir with two objectives. First, to fight bromate by stopping sunlight, which forms this carcinogenic component mixing the chlorine and bromide in the water. Second, to let me use “bouncy black balls” in a headline.

It took 30 minutes to unload all the balls from 190 giant bags into the 10-acre, 220-million litre water reservoir that serves 600,000 people in downtown and South L.A.

The move to deploy the balls—3,000,000 will follow soon—comes after Los Angeles Department of Water and Power officials registered high levels of bromate between June and October 2007. Although these weren’t dangerous enough to put the population in risk or call Jack Bauer, the department thought that it would better to be safe than sorry.

Head to the Los Angeles Times to watch the full video. [Nelson Environmental via LA Times—additional photos by Curbed]