Tucson-area firefighters and emergency medical technicians are trained to respond to mass casualties — but they rarely have a need to use those skills.
To build local expertise, Tucson Fire Department Capt. Richard Johnson turned to fire and rescue workers in Israel who know firsthand how to respond to mass casualties. Seven area firefighters spent 10 days in Israel last month as part of Southern Arizona’s first Firefighters Without Borders delegation.
The trip was brought together under the auspices of the Greater Tucson Fire Foundation, with additional funding from the Jewish Federation of Southern Arizona’s Compelling Needs Grant, the Jewish Community Foundation of Southern Arizona, Temple Emanu-El, Congregation Anshei Israel and several private donors. No public funds were used to pay for the trip, Greater Tucson Fire Foundation Chair Mike McKendrick said.
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“For being a non-world traveler, my eyeballs were opened up big and wide,” said Capt. Scott Laird of the Rincon Valley Fire District. “I don’t think that we in Tucson, or even in Arizona, have a clue about what could happen.”
In his 25 years as a firefighter, Laird said he has responded to only one bombing – a woman trying to kill her husband.
“Our heads are in the sand. Their heads are on a swivel,” he said. “They’re a lot more aware of what can happen.”
The firefighters learned about a wide range of services, from high-level command centers to municipal fire stations and grassroots volunteer operations.
“We had access to the most secure installation in the most security-conscious nation on Earth,” said Lt. Thomas Tucker of the Tucson Airport Authority Fire Department. “We were given credibility and access that I didn’t expect us to get.”
Group members were particularly inspired by the culture of preparedness and volunteerism they encountered. “I was impressed with the resiliency, the sense of community,” said Tucker. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Everyone seems like a first responder to me.”
This sense of communal responsibility, coupled with training through mandatory military service, enables Israel to rely on a relatively small cadre of professional first responders. The main Jerusalem fire station, for example, has just 35 firefighters to serve more than 1 million residents.
“It’s incredible to think they can handle emergencies with that force,” said Capt. Kyle Canty of the Northwest Fire District. “But every individual citizen has a sense of responsibility. With so many volunteers, they can manage with a smaller force.”
Some Israeli organizations responsible for emergency response – such as the Magen David Adom emergency medicine and ambulance service and ZAKA, which responds to help victims of terrorist attacks – are staffed almost entirely by volunteers.
“When a fire station gets an emergency call, they send two to seven firefighters to the scene,” said Capt. Kris Blume of the Tucson Fire Department. “What they find when they get there is that neighbors are already helping each other. People are trained to be self-reliant and to be responsible for each other. Here, we are dependent on someone else to save the day.”
In Bat Hadar, a town in the Hof Ashkelon region, which is also in partnership with Tucson, the delegation met with the Israel Trauma Coalition and learned about its efforts at building resiliency on a grassroots level for people who live with the daily threat of rocket fire from the Gaza Strip. “That hit home for me,” said Division Chief Kelly McCoy of the Northwest Fire District. “I never connected the dots before between terrorism and what terror feels like.”
What hit home for Capt. Mark Lytle of the Green Valley Fire District, the only Jewish firefighter in the delegation, was a video of children on a playground in the town of Sderot, who had just 15 seconds to run to a bomb shelter at the sound of an air raid siren. “I thought of my kids. I have two kids at Anshei preschool. It makes it more personal, the feeling of being targeted because you are Jewish. It’s sobering to experience that.”
Getting to know Israeli firefighters as they were hosted in municipal and rural fire stations across the county, and discovering how much they have in common despite working in dramatically different conditions, was a highlight for the group. “I was moved by the passion they have for doing their job,” said Canty. “They need to really be on the top of their game because they always have the threat of a mass casualty emergency.”
The delegation also met with their counterparts in the Israel Defense Forces – the Home Front Command’s Orange Firefighter Brigade. They observed drills that included rescuing an injured person from a building, rescuing victims from a crushed car and extinguishing a car fire. Tucsonan Shoham Ozeri, a corporal in the IDF’s search-and-rescue unit, met with them afterward to share her story of moving back to Israel as a soldier. (Full disclosure from a proud mother: Shoham is my oldest daughter and all of the firefighters said how impressed they were with her presentation.)
The group agreed that the most emotional moment was planting trees on Mount Carmel, the scene of Israel’s worst forest fire. Among the 44 victims was 16-year-old volunteer Fire Scout Elad Riven, who died battling the blaze. At a memorial for the victims, the firefighters met with his mother, Tzvia Riven. They were moved by her efforts to honor her son’s memory by promoting the value of “Adam l’adam adam” – “people to people are people.” In other words, always approach others with humanity and dignity.
From a professional perspective, the lessons the firefighters learned will help shape future policy and training, Fire Foundation Chair McKendrick said. The trip also brought them closer to a nation far from home.
“We went as seven firefighters,” Rincon Valley’s Laird said, “and came back as seven ambassadors for Israel.”
