The Community Brigade, a volunteer wildfire response and resilience organization, operates across Malibu, Topanga, and the surrounding Santa Monica Mountains—an area prone to chronic cell coverage issues and frequent infrastructure failures during major fires. To bolster operational communications, situational awareness, personnel accountability, and coordination with partner agencies, the Brigade integrated Starlink across its fleet, deploying 22 units on 10 fire apparatus, personal vehicles, and base camps.

During incidents like the Palisades Fire, Starlink transformed field deployments in infrastructure-compromised environments and embedding the technology into updated standard operating procedures (SOPs) for scalable, mission-critical use.

In the wildfire-vulnerable Santa Monica Mountains, the Community Brigade grappled with unreliable communication systems that faltered during critical incidents, as chronic poor cell coverage, network congestion from evacuations, and rapid infrastructure damage from flames and power outages left teams unconnected when seconds mattered most. Prior to Starlink, reliance on very high frequency handheld or mobile radios and repeaters offered limited voice-only coordination but no high-bandwidth capabilities for digital tools, while cellular networks routinely collapsed—creating dangerous gaps in real-time situational awareness, mapping, and inter-team updates that exposed personnel to heightened safety risks.

These limitations were starkly evident during the Palisades Fire, where downed cell towers severed access to essential functions like personnel tracking, fire progression modeling, and coordination with the Sheriff's Department, slowing decision-making, hindering accountability for volunteers and apparatus, and constraining life-safety missions amid chaotic, zero-infrastructure conditions. As the organization rapidly expanded its formal incident command system-aligned operations to cover more ground with limited resources, the absence of a mobile, scalable platform exacerbated these issues, forcing reactive firefighting rather than proactive resilience and underscoring the urgent need for dependable connectivity that could withstand extreme environmental stresses without overhauling existing workflows.

Starlink revolutionized the Community Brigade's wildfire response, delivering uninterrupted high-speed internet even when local cell towers and power grids failed, empowering real-time operational tools like mapping, fire progression modeling, incident updates, and personnel tracking that were previously unattainable.

By integrating 22 rugged, mobile units across apparatus and vehicles, the solution ensured organization-wide reliability, enabling constant communication with partners like the Sheriff's Department during wellness checks and life-safety operations—effectively reducing connectivity downtime to zero during major incidents. This deployment not only addressed immediate gaps but also supported scalable growth, turning chronic blackspots into resilient hotspots for volunteer coordination. As a result, the Brigade achieved: