Los Angeles County Rescue Team Comes Home After 383 Building Assessments in Panama

LOS ANGELES

Ten members of Los Angeles County's international Urban Search and Rescue Team came home to Los Angeles on Wednesday, October 21, after a deployment to Panama that produced more than 383 critical structural safety assessments across seven provinces and 33 districts, MyNewsLA reported. MyNewsLA reported that the team was due to arrive at about 12:40 p.m. Wednesday at Los Angeles International Airport's Tom Bradley International Terminal.

The composition of the team tells you what the mission actually was. MyNewsLA reported that the 10-member team consisted of six firefighters from the Los Angeles County Fire Department, three structural specialists from the Los Angeles County Department of Public Works and one medical doctor from Los Angeles County Health Services. Wisevoter reported the same breakdown — six firefighters, three structural specialists and one medical doctor — and Wisevoter reported that the team completed 383 safety assessments on damaged homes, roads, bridges and schools after the magnitude 7.7 earthquake.

This was not a rescue mission in the cinematic sense of pulling survivors from rubble. It was the slower, less visible work that determines whether a country can safely go back inside its own buildings: standing in front of cracked schools, health centers and churches, province by province, and deciding what is safe, what is repairable and what must stay closed.

Twelve days, seven provinces, 383 buildings

MyNewsLA reported that the team left Los Angeles on October 9 following a magnitude 7.7 earthquake that damaged homes, schools, bridges and roads in southern Panama. MyNewsLA reported in its earlier deployment coverage that the team, dubbed USA-02, was activated by the U.S. State Department and departed that night for Panama, and that the earthquake was followed by dozens of aftershocks, including one with a magnitude of 6.6.

Once on the ground, the work fanned out far beyond the epicenter. MyNewsLA reported that the team partnered with a team from the Fairfax County Fire Department to conduct over 383 critical structural safety assessments across seven provinces and 33 districts. MyNewsLA reported that the team's priorities included health centers, schools, medical facilities, government buildings, emergency services buildings and churches, according to fire officials. That priority list is a map of what a community needs first after a disaster: somewhere to treat the injured, somewhere to teach children, somewhere for government to function, and somewhere for people to gather.

Wisevoter reported that the ten-member team returned home on October 21 following the mission, and Wisevoter summarized the deployment as providing critical expertise in assessing damaged infrastructure, including schools and medical facilities, to ensure public safety following widespread destruction. The two accounts agree on the central numbers — 10 members, 383 assessments, seven provinces, 33 districts — and on the reason the assessments mattered: every building cleared is a building a Panamanian family, nurse, teacher or firefighter can use again, and every building condemned is a collapse that does not happen later.

Sent within 24 hours, at Panama's request

The speed of the deployment is part of the record. The U.S. Department of State reported that, on October 9, a magnitude 7.7 earthquake struck southern Panama, and that the State Department deployed a Disaster Assistance Response Team, as well as the Fairfax County and Los Angeles County Urban Search and Rescue technical teams, to conduct expert structural assessments at the request of the Panamanian government. The Rothman Report reported, summarizing a U.S. Embassy release, that at the request of Panama's government the United States sent a Disaster Assistance Response Team that included two urban search and rescue technical teams — one from Fairfax County, Virginia, and one from Los Angeles County, California — with 20 specialists in total.

The Rothman Report quoted the embassy release, in which Ambassador Kevin Cabrera said, as the Rothman Report reported: “Panama can count on the United States. When our friends need us, America responds.” The Rothman Report reported that the embassy's October 11 release laid out a timeline in which structural assessment experts were on the ground in less than 24 hours. The State Department reported that Ambassador Kevin Cabrera and the Department of State continued to liaise with President José Raúl Mulino and the Panamanian government as they assessed the damage.

SoCal Reporters reported, in its deployment coverage, that the 10-member technical support group from the Los Angeles County Fire Department's USA-02 team was activated by the U.S. Department of State after two major earthquakes struck Panama, and SoCal Reporters reported that it was the team's third international deployment of 2026. SoCal Reporters also reported that the full 79-member heavy rescue team was notified that it could be deployed, though no broader deployment had been confirmed at that time — a detail that underlines how close this mission came to being much larger.

Why Los Angeles County, specifically

Los Angeles County is one of a small number of American jurisdictions that maintain an internationally deployable urban search and rescue capability, and earthquakes are the reason. A county that lives with its own seismic risk trains firefighters, structural specialists and physicians to read damaged buildings the way other specialists read charts — and that expertise travels. When the State Department activates USA-02, it is buying a team that has drilled for exactly the building stock, aftershock patterns and infrastructure failures that a magnitude 7.7 earthquake produces.

The partnership with Fairfax County is the other half of the model. MyNewsLA reported that the Los Angeles team partnered with the Fairfax County Fire Department team in Panama, and the State Department reported that both county teams deployed as technical teams under the Disaster Assistance Response Team. Two county teams, 20 specialists in total between them according to the embassy timeline the Rothman Report summarized, can split provinces and districts between them — which is how a combined effort reaches a number like 383 assessments in under two weeks.

Home, with the work documented

Wednesday's arrival at Tom Bradley International Terminal closes the deployment that began on October 9. MyNewsLA reported the six firefighters, three Public Works structural specialists and one Health Services doctor were to be welcomed home later Wednesday. What they leave behind in Panama is a documented inventory: hundreds of buildings assessed, priorities worked in the order a recovering community needs them — health centers and medical facilities, schools, emergency services buildings, government buildings and churches — across seven provinces and 33 districts.

For readers in Los Angeles, the story cuts both ways. The same expertise Panama borrowed this month is the expertise this county maintains for its own worst day, and deployments like this one are how the team stays practiced at real disaster work rather than only drills. Previously is also tracking the weather side of a busy Southwest week in our coverage of the storm bringing Los Angeles its wettest October since 2009, and readers can follow developing regional coverage on the Previously news front.