Harold Schapelhouman – BOD Director; Retired Menlo Park Fire District Chief
Since retiring from the Menlo Park Fire Protection District in June 2021 I have remained active in the emergency services community serving as an advisor, mentor, advocate, speaker, volunteer and subject matter expert on a variety of issues that are both important to first responders and of interest to me.
At the request of the Deputy Administrator of NASA, Pam Melroy, I assisted NASA Ames in Mountain View with their Joint NASA/FAA Next- Gen Project and Air Space Management Program in support of first responders and focused on Wildland Fire Response, specific to the use and coordination of manned aviation and coming unmanned aerial systems (drone platforms) for aerial observation and firefighting.
In addition, I was involved with Nor-Cal Firefighters in support of Ukrainian Firefighters. A foundation that was created to collect used but serviceable fire equipment from Northern California Fire Agencies that was sent to the Ukraine.
I currently serve as an unpaid technical advisor to Komodo Fire Systems, an eco friendly plant based fire retardant company, Ladris Inc, an evacuation and fire modeling software company and most recently, Fire Dome, an Israeli based start up.
I also currently serve as the Menlo Park Fire Districts Historian and as a board member involved with California Urban Search and Rescue Task Force 3 (CA-TF3), a non-profit foundation that was created to support our search, rescue and recovery dog teams and other important equipment acquisition initiatives, not on the Federal equipment cache list, like Star-link. To help, click here.
In addition, I have assisted in the support of proposed statewide policies and potential legislation related changes to medical discrimination for emergency workers and advocacy for National legislation related to improving the integration, support, funding, adoption and acceleration of Unmanned Aerial Systems for the Fire Service.
Prior to retirement, I spent 40 years with the Menlo Park Fire Protection District starting as a firefighter and finishing as the Fire Chief. The Fire District serves 100,000 residents and businesses located in the communities of Atherton, East Palo Alto, Menlo Park and unincorporated San Mateo County. The Fire District is located along the San Francisco Bay and in what is known as Silicon Valley.
As the Fire Chief, I reported to five elected Board Members who governed the District and together we were responsible for managing a 30 square mile area served by seven fire stations, twelve first response units staffed daily by 33 front line personnel with a full staff of 155 employees that included safety, code enforcement, support, public education and administrative personnel.
I managed an annual budget of $60 million dollars with a reserve of $65 million broken into various categories with no debt or outstanding obligations. We achieved an AA+ Bond rating, the highest available and clean audits each of the 14 years I was the Fire Chief.
One of my greatest accomplishments was the the purchase of nine strategically located properties, two used for an updated administrative headquarters, a warehouse for special operations and six properties located next to existing fire stations allowing us to rebuild three larger, modern, drive through fire stations and have additional space to rebuild, expand and construct three more fire stations in the future.
I worked closely with each of our jurisdictions Town, City’s and County Manager as well as our Police Chiefs, Sheriff and CHP Commander. We also closely coordinated with Public Safety Communications (Dispatch), the Office of Emergency Management and Office of Emergency Medical Services regarding our field paramedics and emergency first response medical units as well as the other County Fire Chiefs on automatic aid, the greater alarm plan, communications infrastructure, out of county (Statewide) mutual aid for Wildland strike teams and individual resource staffing requests coordination.
We also provided special contract services to our largest employer, Facebook Headquarters and their multiple campuses as well as the SLAC National Laboratory, one of the ten Department of Energy (DOE) facilities in the Country.
We also managed first response service contracts and agreements with the California Governors Office of Emergency Services (Cal-OES) and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Emergency Support Function 9 (ESF-9), Urban Search and Rescue (US&R) as California Task Force 3 (CA-TF3) an “all risk” Task Force specializing in catastrophic collapse, flood, wild land fire and other environmental and man made incidents needing immediate search, rescue and recovery operations.
The FEMA annual performance agreement was supported by a staff of four personnel and an annual budget of $1.1 million dollars. The Fire District provided a 28,000 square foot warehouse for office, equipment and vehicle storage as well as a multi-acre training site for the 220 Team members from 16 local Fire Agencies and 60 civilian professionals that supported Task Force 3.
Over the years, I have served as an instructor and subject matter expert in emergency response related to terrorism, structural collapse, technical rescue and recovery operations, drone operations and use, water rescue, Wildland firefighting, community preparedness, incident command and control as well as firefighter safety.