In 1985, after an earthquake jolted Mexico City, the United States government for the first time dispatched a group of firefighters to help. Building on that experience, the Foreign Disaster Assistance office and its counterparts in several other countries established a global network of search-and-rescue teams that could be called up to respond to catastrophes around the world. The Federal Emergency Management Agency soon set up a similar system for domestic calamities. The 1989 Loma Prieta quake in San Francisco was the turning point. “Not only did they have an earthquake, they had fires, building collapses, freeway collapses,” says Dewey Perks, a Virginia firefighter who serves as the liaison between the Foreign Disaster Assistance office and the response teams. “Most fire departments had basic rescue capability, but that had to be expanded to bring in engineers, doctors, dog teams, and so on.”

Larry Collins, a short but beefy 54-year-old with a square, dimpled jaw and undisciplined hair, is one of the founders of the Los Angeles County Fire Department’s search-and-rescue program and the California task force. He got motivated after he nearly drowned saving a fisherman who was swept from a rocky reef off the Palos Verdes shore during a storm in 1982. “I’ve been swimming since I was 2 years old, so I felt comfortable taking off my boots and diving in,” says Collins. “But I kept getting shoved under the water and pounded onto the rocks by the waves. I was that close to letting him go.” A couple of other firefighters finally succeeded in throwing him a rope, and Collins pulled himself and the fisherman out. Soon after, he began lobbying the department to set up special training for water rescues.

Collins is now a battalion chief and one of the world’s foremost experts in finding and rescuing people trapped in every imaginable circumstance. He has rappelled headfirst to pull out a man stuck like a cork at the bottom of an 80-foot borehole, hauled a baby and mother out of a flood-swollen river, led the five-hour extraction of a woman pinned beneath five stories of debris by the Haiti earthquake, and worked the aftermath of train wrecks, plane crashes, 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and the Japanese tsunami. His two-volume book on emergency rescue is widely read by firefighters across the country. He will talk for as long as you will listen about the details of historic disasters and epic rescues. I was driving around Los Angeles with him once when he stopped for a red light that was some 30 feet away, beneath a freeway overpass. We were close to where the freeway had collapsed in the 1994 Northridge quake, Collins told me. He prefers not to take chances.

Collins grew up in Simi Valley and signed up for an apprentice firefighting program while he was still in high school. At that point, he was still considering becoming a novelist. “I was very ambivalent because I didn’t want to cut my hair,” he says. “I was a little surf rat with hair past my shoulders.” He wound up joining the department at 19. Many task force members I’ve talked with come from similar backgrounds: raised in some unglamorous but comfortable Southern California town or suburb; parents firefighters, military, or government workers of some kind; became a firefighter soon after graduating high school; drawn to rescue work by a mixture of altruism and thrill seeking.

Battalion Chief Larry Collins, one of the founders of California Task Force Two Photograph by João Canziani

There are outliers, of course. The team used to include a volunteer dog handler named Ron Weckbacher, whose day job was managing investment portfolios with a major financial firm. Or there’s Matt Walmsley. Small but with Popeye forearms and biceps, Walmsley has been a rodeo bull rider, an oil-rig worker, and a Marine attack-jet pilot. “I have a propensity for doing stupid shit that seems exciting,” he says. In the mid-1990s, now a father of four, he tried to move into a more stable occupation; he wound up working at a Home Depot but was barely getting by. “We were living out of a van,” he says. “I thought about becoming a chiropractor or going to law school.” At age 42, he managed to get hired by the L.A. County Fire Department and made the task force a few years later.

One October morning a couple of years ago, in the scrubby hills north of Los Angeles, Collins and I rolled up in his Chevy Suburban alongside a huge pile of shattered concrete, steel bars, broken furniture, and battered household appliances. A squad of firefighters atop the simulated collapsed building were in the fourth hour of an effort to free a victim trapped in the debris — a live volunteer, gamely crying out for help. They’d pinpointed his location by probing the wreckage using a flexible pole with a tiny camera on one end and a screen on the other, and they were now crowbarring and sawing their way toward him.

The firefighters had an arsenal of jackhammers, concrete cutters, and other demolition gear a few yards away but were working slowly with hand tools to make sure they didn’t accidentally bring more wreckage crashing down. Learning when to use which tools and how to cut one object without making another move are key skills. No California task force member has been killed during deployments, but many have been injured. “How’s it going?” Collins called to the firefighters. “It’s just a grunt fest,” replied one of the squad, sweating under his helmet and layers of protective gear. “All right, dude, have fun!” Collins said with a grin and upraised thumb, and drove off to see how things were progressing down the road at the next rubble heap.

The occasion was a training exercise at the 160-acre Del Valle Fire Training Center, a sort of emergency-response theme park. The $20 million center is set up to re-create just about any calamity Los Angeles County firefighters might encounter. It includes several mountainous piles of reconfigurable rubble and a 500-foot stretch of freeway with an overturned tanker truck that can shoot flames and leak tinted-water “chemicals” while hidden speakers blare sounds of traffic and screaming victims. There’s also a warehouse equipped with hidden flamethrowers, theatrical lighting, swirling fog, and the simulated stench of poisonous gases.

Exercises at Del Valle are just one facet of the intensive training required to be on the task force. The job entails a functional knowledge of engineering, physics, materials science, seismology, and medicine. You have to take about two months of classes — unpaid, on your own time — before you can even apply. You need to learn how to shore up a tunnel while you’re digging it to keep it from collapsing, how to scoop someone out of the water while dangling from a helicopter, how to use a jackhammer inside a confined space.

“The training can be pretty miserable. You’re thinking, Why are they doing this to me?” says Jeff Britton, a veteran task force member. “But when I went to Haiti” — after the 2010 earthquake — “it all made sense. If you can put up with the training, a deployment is just another day at the office.”