By the Beverly Hills Fire Department
Mutual aid is one of the fire service’s greatest strengths. When a community needs help, firefighters come.
For many communities in Southern California, such emergency responses are often for wildland or wildland/urban interface fires. Among many others, the massive Palisades Fire that tore through the region in January 2025 certainly demonstrated how quickly wildfire response can become a regional operation.
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The problem: Even with exceptional firefighters providing aid, they cannot be expected to be experts or know which road provides the best access to a particular neighborhood when the smoke sets in. Firefighters, who may have spent their careers protecting another community, won’t know which streets will become difficult to navigate, where apparatus can and cannot turn around, where a narrow road becomes a dead end, or where a crew could become committed without a safe means of egress.
The Beverly Hills Fire Department — a highly urbanized community located in wildland fire-prone Los Angeles County — recognized this risk and took proactive steps to ensure that local information would be readily available and deliberately placed where it’s needed most during an emergency.
Fire Chief Gregory W. Barton emphasizes, “We know that if we have a significant wildfire in Beverly Hills, we must count on mutual-aid resources to support us. Those firefighters know how to fight fire. What they don’t necessarily know is the geography of Beverly Hills. Our job is to get them that local intel as quickly as possible to ensure their safety and the best chance of success.”
Beacon Box program
Firefighters arriving from another jurisdiction do not necessarily need a voluminous emergency plan. They need precise and actionable information.
Beverly Hills Fire’s Beacon Box program places 13 information distribution stations — in the form of literal boxes — strategically throughout the city. The stations include resources pulled together from information that already exists within the city’s GIS, emergency management and fire department, adds fire science information, and bundles it in a zoomed-in, high-resolution mapping format that’s immediately useful in the field. There are QR codes, an array of flash drives, and, if all else fails, a highly curated, localized map package of the Beacon Box zones. It’s the right information at the right scale.
The Beacon Boxes platform has become a force-multiplier for emergency response, because it allows the department’s existing preparedness work to extend to every firefighter who arrives to help. Rather than relying on BHFD personnel to communicate every piece of local knowledge to every incoming company, the Beacon Boxes supplement that effort with tactically located information. This is especially significant and lifesaving during a fast-moving wildfire, when incident commanders may have very little time to brief incoming companies.
As Chief Barton noted: “The objective is to reduce the amount of time between ‘You’re assigned to this area’ and ‘You understand the area well enough to engage and operate effectively. That’s what we are looking for.”
Furthermore, providing such information gives mutual-aid crews the confidence to act in the moment. Firefighters will be more willing to commit their crew and apparatus deep into a neighborhood or make an aggressive tactical decision if they know they can get their apparatus and crew back out safely. Clear maps showing where apparatus can safely enter, maneuver, turn around, and exit is fundamental. Add accurate street and structure data, including hydrant and pool locations, and incoming firefighters begin to develop a more complete operational picture.
How to replicate
Agencies interested in establishing a similar program can begin by identifying the areas within their jurisdiction where incoming mutual-aid firefighters would benefit most from immediate access to local operational intelligence. Agencies can then tailor the process to their geography, existing GIS resources, and specific operational needs.
FlameMapper invented and holds multiple patents related to the Beacon Box platform and can be reached via email or www.BeaconBox.us.
A simple investment
At the end of the day, there’s a straightforward question that demands a straightforward answer: Can incoming firefighters, assigned to protect one of the neighborhoods, understand what they need to know quickly enough to make good decisions? The answer must be yes. The Beacon Boxes help us fortify our emergency response, not only with our own firefighters, but also the firefighters who will arrive from miles away, when the community needs them most.
As Chief Barton says, “Don’t just prepare for the fire. Prepare for the firefighters who will come to fight it.”
ABOUT THE DEPARTMENT
The Beverly Hills Fire Department is charged with the preservation of life and property within the Beverly Hills community of Los Angeles County. The 123 firefighters and civilian personnel are led by Fire Chief Gregory Barton. The Beverly Hills Fire Department operates the city’s three fire stations and responds to over 8,600 incidents per year. Personnel protect approximately 34,000 residents and an estimated 150,000 to 200,000 daily visitors in a 5.7 square mile area. The department achieved a Class 1 public protection classification rating via the Insurance Services Office (ISO) as well as International Accreditation from the Commission on Fire Accreditation International by the Center for Public Safety Excellence.
