2027.
March 29th, 2010
For more than 25 years, Danny Canyon was the great city’s most celebrated helicopter traffic reporter. In this place where the collective psyche was so linked to traffic and travel times, Canyon possessed an uncanny ability to know exactly where to hover his chopper and how to correctly read the impact of everything from a routine fender bender to a multi-vehicle fatality. When a tanker truck flipped over on the Hollywood Freeway back in ’04, spreading hydrogen sulfide gas into neighboring communities, it was Canyon who identified that it would back up the Pasadena Freeway all the way to Orange Grove Avenue. And when that school bus collided with the Metrorail train in ’09, Canyon was the first to suggest the 2 as a shortcut. And so things went well for Canyon until the morning on his day off when his Audi struck the corner of a yellow Accord and spun in front of a garbage truck on the San Diego Freeway. He was listening to his own station just before the accident, and as the fire crept closer to his pinned legs, he could hear his weekend replacement, Tommy Tam, calling the accident from a chopper above. As Tommy described the backup and possible detours, Canyon cried to no one’s ears, “I’m burning here, for Christ’s sake. My suffering is not a Sigalert!”