'A bunch of balloons' at LAX

[GeoffSM1]

I was looking for the audio for a Lufthansa A388 incident near Los Angeles on Mar 18th 2016; object close to the aircraft on final approach, when I came across the coms included in this clip.

Here is a link to the info about the Lufthansa flight.
 http://avherald.com/h?article=4959f68f&opt=256

[VASAviation]

Anyone knows something about the balloons?

Is that any hot-air balloon race or something?

[Rick108]

It's not clear from the recording, but I'm betting these were the small party-type balloons one would buy at the store.  Maybe somebody had a grand opening, or a big birthday party, etc. and they released a bunch of balloons?  If they were a bunch of full-size hot-air balloons, this would have been a much bigger deal - and ATC would probably have had them on radar!

Hmmmmm... in the US, balloons have the right-of-way over powered aircraft.  I wonder if that applies to toy balloons, too!  ha ha   

[VASAviation]

That's the quid of my question, Rick!

But maybe I just thought "why is the controller gonna give information about little party balloons"... now my question is, how high can these little balloons fly before explode or start falling back again?

It's for a video I'm editing of this and I don't know how to picture the situation...