Harold Schapelhouman said he’s not planning on “turning the place upside down” when he takes over as chief of the Menlo Park Fire Protection District on January 1.
He will, however, work to increase community outreach and education programs focused on fire prevention and disaster preparedness, he said last week after his appointment was announced.
Mr. Schapelhouman, a 25-year fire district veteran who was promoted to deputy chief in April, was appointed to the district’s top position by a unanimous vote of the district board on August 15.
The district encompasses Menlo Park, Atherton, East Palo Alto and nearby unincorporated areas.
He will be the first chief to be appointed from within the district ranks in 21 years, according to John Osmer, president of the district board.
Except for a nine-month stint as a student firefighter in Los Altos, he has spent his entire career at the Menlo Park district, holding positions ranging from dispatcher, firefighter and fire investigator to training captain, division chief of special operations and deputy chief.
He will succeed Doug Sporleder, a retired chief of the Santa Clara County Fire Department who last August took up the reins at the district to help the board choose a permanent chief.
Led rescue team
Mr. Schapelhouman, 45, was instrumental in shaping the district’s emergency preparedness and rescue programs. Until he was appointed deputy chief this year, he headed California Task Force 3, one of the state’s eight regional urban search and rescue teams, and one of 28 federal teams.The task force is administered by the Menlo Park fire district, and made up of Bay Area firefighters, search and rescue specialists, medical professionals and others needed to deal with disasters. It was deployed to the World Trade Center after the September 11 attacks, to New Orleans last year to help rescue flood victims, to Oklahoma City in the aftermath of the terrorist bombing of the Murrah federal building, and to many other natural disaster and high-security sites since it was formed in 1991.
Mr. Schapelhouman made his mark in the emergency preparedness and rescue arena even before the task force was created in 1991. Early in his career with the district, he and another junior firefighter were sent to participate in a county-sponsored emergency response and critical care exercise. That’s when they discovered that many of the written guidelines for county emergency workers responding to a disaster were dismayingly outdated.
So he and his colleague took on the task of updating information in the county’s response protocols, “and that morphed into developing emergency guidelines,” he said.
He then began attending classes and focusing on disaster response, networking with emergency workers from other areas who had dealt with their own disasters to learn from their experiences.
When the government launched its project creating search and rescue task forces throughout the country to deal with disasters, Mr. Schapelhouman was a key player in the district’s winning the contract to administer and house California Task Force 3.
“We were in a position to bid at that point,” he said, adding that he lobbied the fire chief at the time, Jim Bennett, to push for the district’s leadership role.
Born in Canada, Mr. Schapelhouman grew up in Palo Alto and other Peninsula towns. He lives with his wife Lada and daughter Meaghan in San Jose, 23 miles from work — meeting the district’s residency requirement for its fire chiefs by two miles, he said.
