Israel firefighting experts help California with methods to track blazes
Six-member Israeli team shares experiences and expertise to assist overwhelmed West Coast firefighters, get a warm embrace from LA Jewish community

Amid deadly blazes that swept California this month, a team of experts with Israel’s Fire and Rescue Authority flew there for a week-long visit to aid the state’s firefighters and share their experiences.
Though the six-person delegation returned to Israel on Wednesday, their American counterparts told The Times of Israel that they now plan to adopt strategies used by Israeli firefighters to track the spread of wildfires.
Israel and California have nearly identical climates, with wet winters full of rain and a hot, dry summer season that lends itself to recurring blazes. But despite facing similar challenges, the two forces found that they were worlds apart when it came to their methods.
“There’s a lot of bureaucracy that goes on here in the US,” explained Mike Katan, a firefighter-paramedic in Ventura County who accompanied the team as an impromptu Hebrew-English translator.
He quipped that the Israeli mindset was to “do what needs to be done,” regardless of “bureaucratic red tape.”
Israel’s Fire and Rescue Authority is quite small compared to Cal Fire, the state’s fire agency, however, being deeply embedded in the country’s security framework has granted Israeli firefighters quick access to geographical data that American rescue services often struggle to obtain.

Over the past year, Israeli teams have had to battle frequent fires caused by thousands of rockets fired into Israel by Hamas and Hezbollah.
According to Katan and others, the close cooperation between Israel’s fire department and other state security agencies helps the former map wildfires as they spread.
Katan contrasted this streamlined system to the labyrinthine “alphabet soup” navigated by American fire protection services.
David Scheurich, the Staff Chief of Cooperative Fire Protection for Cal Fire, painted a similar picture. He explained that Israeli firefighters “have real-time live satellite imaging that they can look at, whereas ours [in the US] go through a request process.”
With its limited rank and file, Israeli fire protection services also comb social media for geographical data, a foreign practice to California’s firefighters.
Meanwhile, Cal Fire officials relied on their data to track the conflagrations this winter, which they gathered by flying over affected areas with infrared cameras.

Scheurich informed The Times of Israel that Cal Fire aims to implement Israeli mapping strategies stateside.
“In today’s day and age, with more and more devastating fires, we have to collaborate,” he said. Multiple members of the Israeli delegation said they plan to stay in touch with their California colleagues.
Before dispatching its six experts, the Fire and Rescue Authority initially weighed sending a team of firefighters to bulk up California’s embattled forces.
“When reports started coming in about the huge wildfires in Los Angeles, the Fire and Rescue Authority decided it wanted to send a delegation of around 20 to 30 people to aid in fighting the fires,” said delegation head Avi Ben-Zaken to The Times of Israel.
But the plan was quickly shelved when it became clear that California’s fire department was too overwhelmed to accommodate extra personnel from overseas.
So the Israeli agency instead decided on a cost-effective alternative, sending a smaller team — five Fire and Rescue Authority officials along with a representative of the IDF Home Front Command — to offer professional expertise.
Many on the team accrued experience combating wildfires in Israel and abroad while on aid trips to neighboring countries like Cyprus and Greece, making them well-equipped to help the West Coast state.
“We have had wildfires already in Israel, perhaps not of the size over there [in California] but still, we have had quite big ones,” said Fire and Rescue Authority spokeswoman Tal Volvovitch. “We are now seeing, outside Israel, the sheer damage that fire can cause and the power it has.”
For the Israeli experts, the visit morphed into much more than a professional trip as they found themselves swept up in the warm embrace of the city’s Jewish community, the second largest in the US.

Jewish life in Los Angeles was hit hard this January, as the wildfires leveled a historic synagogue, alongside countless homes.
“When we arrived there, we realized that a lot of the houses in the Palisades belonged to Jewish people, sometimes Holocaust survivors,” said Dr. Shai Levy, one of the delegation participants, to The Times of Israel. “It gave us the sense that we were there on a different mission.”
On the first night of their stay, the Israeli delegation was hosted for dinner by the owner of a local kosher restaurant, where they dined with a handful of American firefighters.
The team attended Shabbat services later that week at a local synagogue, and then had Friday night dinner with members of the congregation.
“We got a huge hug from the Jewish community,” Levy continued. “Usually we come as experts on these delegations just as professionals, as firefighters, but here there was something else.”
Great to welcome brave Israeli firefighters to L.A. who have joined the effort to contain the #LosAngelesFires #Israel is not just sending firefighters but absorbing all costs to do so. @IsraelinLA pic.twitter.com/ve29hF8RD9
— Congressman Brad Sherman (@BradSherman) January 18, 2025
California congressman Rep. Brad Sherman also met with fire experts and commended them in a post, noting that the Israeli government footed the bill for all costs related to their visit.