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Discover the premier and original podcast dedicated to wildland firefighting, the vibrant culture surrounding wildland firefighters, firefighter mental health and physical performance, and the wilderness - The Anchor Point Podcast... Join our global community as we delve into the captivating stories of Wildland Firefighters, shed light on career opportunities, promote fire prevention awareness, educate the public, and openly discuss the mental health struggles and triumphs faced by firefighters on and off duty. Immerse yourself in our unscripted and unedited long-form interviews, where we leave no topic unexplored.
With The Anchor Point Podcast, you'll gain free and exclusive access to firsthand experiences shared by wildland firefighters, industry experts, mental health clinicians, physical performance professionals, doctors, scientists, and the families of fire line operators. Our episodes encapsulate the entire spectrum of emotions, from the extraordinary and awe-inspiring moments to the challenging and humorous anecdotes that arise within the industry.
One of our podcast's core focuses lies in unraveling the physical and mental demands encountered while working in the field. We delve into topics such as proper nutrition and hydration, stress management, relationships, and maintaining focus, offering valuable insights and shared experiences.
Prepare to embark on an immersive journey into the heart of the action, as each episode of The Anchor Point Podcast takes you on an in-depth exploration of the challenges and rewards experienced by fireline operators. Engage in enlightening interviews and discussions with subject matter experts that provide a comprehensive understanding of wildland firefighting.
Whether you are a passionate wildland firefighting enthusiast or an individual seeking to expand your knowledge, The Anchor Point Podcast is an indispensable and trusted resource. Our episodes cover a broad range of topics, including fire behavior, weather patterns, medical know-how, equipment, gear, and the evolving role of technology in firefighting.
The Anchor Point Podcast is your gateway to a unique and invaluable vantage point on the challenges and rewards of fireline work. Whether you're seeking to expand your understanding of wildland firefighting or simply captivated by the extraordinary tales from the frontlines, our podcast is an essential resource. Subscribe today and unlock a wealth of knowledge and inspiration.
What's going on? Welcome back. This episode is going to be brought to you by Mystery Ranch, Built for the Mission. If you haven't been rocking a Mystery Ranch fire line pack during your entire career, it sucks to be you because they make some of the best fire packs in the business. That's not just all they make. They make little cucymas to go with your fire career, even outside of fire.
Specifically the fire stuff, they got the Big Ernie Pack and the Talk Box 5000. It's a pretty sweet little radio harness that fits all the Bendix King radios out there in use. It's pretty badass. They have everything even to the Flight Monster. If you need to pack your things and get on out to Canada like a lot of you have been doing in 2023, they have a solution for you. Not only that but they have solutions to further your education.
Why do I bring up how badass Mystery Ranch is? It is not only because of their badass gear and packs but because they are supporting badasses like you in the field to help further their education and professional development. Why do they do this? It is because they care. They are invested in the wildland fire community. They want to give back to this community because they want you to succeed. How do they do this? It's all through the Backbone Series scholarships. If you haven't checked out the Mystery Ranch Backbone Series scholarships, you better go over to www.MysteryRanch.com and check it out.
There is a $1,000 scholarship up for grabs to pursue your professional development. Whether that be an EMT course or that S course that no one's going to pay for, you have an opportunity to get some funding to make your dream come true and develop your professional career. All you got to do is tell your story about fighting wildland fire. If it's compelling and it's not written in crayon, you have an opportunity to win one of these $1,000 Mystery Ranch Backbone Series scholarships to pursue your professional development. All you got to do is go over to www.MysteryRanch.com. Look out for the announcements of the next round of scholarships and put your name in the hat. It's simple as that.
This show is also going to be brought to you by our homies over at Hotshot Brewery. Hotshot Brewery makes the most kick-ass coffee for the most kick-ass cause. A portion of the proceeds will always go back to the Wildland Firefighter Foundation. If you're in the market for some good coffee or all the tools of the trade to get your morning started right or a whole list of wildland firefighter-themed apparel, then look no further than Hotshot Brewery. It's awesome.
While you're over there, you can get some Anchor Point stuff. We have a little deal going where you can get some exclusive Anchor Point merch by going over there. Search for it and you will find it. Go over to www.HotshotBrewing.com and get all the tools of the trade to start your morning off right and all the coffee for causes that you can ever need.
Last but not least, the show is not sponsored by or brought to you by but it is one of those close relationships I have with Bethany over there at The American Wildfire Experience. I want to show her some love for as long as I can because I believe in her cause and her mission. She's got some rad stuff going on.
If you don't know what The American Wildfire Experience is, they house The Smokey Generation. I know for a fact a lot of people out there have seen that rolling around. It's pretty awesome. What it is is a digital storytelling platform telling the story of a wildland fire. There have to be over 250 of these stories out there but it's preserving the legacy of the folks in the field and the story of wildland fire. Some of these stories even date back to the 1940s. It's pretty cool.
If you want a little history lesson or you want to sign up for The Smokey Generation grant program, if you've got a compelling story and you're telling the story of wildland fire through the lens of a camera, a video camera, or a still camera through a blog or some animations, there was this one dude out there who made We Move Mountains with Spoons and it's awesome. They're a Smokey Generation grant recipient. The sky is the limit. Tell the story. It's awesome. If you want to find out more, go over to www.Wildfire-Experience.org and check it all out. Bethany, you have a cool organization over there. Keep it up.
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What's going on? Welcome back. I hope everybody's doing well and not going stir-crazy because it is dirty August 2023. There isn’t crap going on pretty much countrywide. We're still sending people out to Alaska. If you get up there on a lucky roll, that's good for you. We're still somehow sending people to Canada, which is even wilder. Who knows? We're one lightning-bust away from a true dirty August 2023. It's going to be one of those seasons where it goes probably into almost November 2023. Everybody wishes they had a crystal ball. I'm no fire weather specialist and I'm not going to pretend to be so it’s a roll of dice. Except for that stuff that happened in Hawaii, that is a tragedy.
In this episode, we are going to be talking all about fire and tech. This is going to be more geared toward your all-risk departments. Let's call it that. However, there is an application for the wildland-specific front. You'll probably see some folks run around on the fire grounds with some iPads. They'll have these little maps and boxes. They'll have resources listed, especially your command-type people, your divisions, or your task force leaders. That program is called Tablet Command.
We are going to sit down and have a chat about Tablet Command with the founder. We're going to talk about Tablet Command, how it came to be, and why this is a situational awareness-enhancing tool. We're also going to talk about leadership, being a servant leader, and being a good follower. We're going to talk about fire-adapted landscapes and communities and a little bit of science, fire fuels, weather, and all that kind of stuff. Without further ado, I'd like to introduce my good friend, Andy Bozzo. Welcome to the show.
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In this episode, I've got Andy Bozzo. He is with Tablet Command. We'll get into that but tell us about yourself.
I am a native Californian. I was born in the Gilroy area and raised in the Santa Cruz area. I was fascinated by fire from a very early age. I lived out in the country in Gilroy at five years old and saw the entire mountainside behind our house. Mount Madonna went in flames. That was about 1972 or ‘73. I'd have to look back in the Cal Fire records to see when that fire happened.
I was pretty decent in school and sports. I went down the whole student-athlete route for high school. I went to the Robert Louis Stevenson School in Pebble Beach. A little-known fact, it’s a boarding school. I was a borderer. People were like, “What'd you do wrong?” It was like a prep school. I won’t reveal that too much in the fire service because that suddenly precludes you from things like being able to crawl under a rig and turn a wrench. It's not mutually exclusive.
I went off to college and did a little athletics. I swam. I transferred midway from the University of Southern California where I was a mediocre-ish swimmer and finished up at Middlebury College with my swimming. I walked onto the lacrosse team in my senior year. There were a lot of lessons learned that transferred over to the fire service. Even some of the coaches and the athletic directors that I had there at Middlebury were fantastic. They informed my career. I have endless gratitude for them and the coaches that I had all through high school as well.
I was a seventh-grade science teacher right after that. I taught Life Sciences because I was a Biology major. I do enjoy teaching and that has also carried over into my fire service career. I've spent some time in and out of training. I've spent most of my time in the companies and even in the companies I'm helping with training efforts.
I taught Science for about five years and then started with Cal Fire, which was like being reunited with a long-lost love. That fire that I saw as a little boy, I got to do that every afternoon with Cal Fire on an engine company in the BEU or San Benito-Monterey. We started in King City so we were going to fires reasonably frequently. It was almost every afternoon so I was getting experience with fire.
My wife got a job in the Pacific Northwest. I'm married. I have two kids. When we were newly married in 1999, after two seasons with Cal Fire, I moved up to the Pacific Northwest. I took a bunch of tests but the first fire department that hired me was called the Kent Fire Department. It's now Puget Sound Fire. They had fantastic personnel and agency. They were very professional. I also had been on a bunch of other lists.
About a couple of years into that, I made the jump to the Tacoma Fire Department, as you see in Tacoma Fire. The reason I did that is because the city of Tacoma was very old. At that point, I thought, “I'm going to stay in urban firefighting for the rest of my career.” I didn't know if we were moving back to California because it was so expensive at the time.
It still is.
It is peanuts compared to that. I hit the jump to the Tacoma Fire Department. I had two successful probations under my belt and learned a lot. I learned great habits at the Kent Fire Department and I cut my structure teeth at the Tacoma Fire Department. We had very frequent reps with residential and commercial structure fires and buildings that are 100 years old. Some of our stations are older than 100 years old. That was cool to be part of that tradition.
The wildland bug never left. I always had this dream of being in that combo of wildland and California County model. About eight years into living in the Northwest, my wife was getting over the weather and I was the vehicle to go back. She was like, “You take some tests. You'll get hired.” I'm like, “I'm not sure I will but I'll take the tests.” I wound up on a few lists and settled on Contra Costa County Fire. I'm in my 17th or 18th year there in 2023. It does encompass all the things that I've wanted to do in the fire service.
I've heard a lot of guys that have retired. The ones that retire at peace say, “I did everything I wanted to do in the fire service.” Maybe that means ranking or serving in different companies. Maybe they wanted to be on hazmat or go out on strike teams. Maybe they wanted to be a smoke jumper, a foreman, or a superintendent. That means different things to different people. For me, everything was, “I want to go to structure fires and wrecks on the freeway. I want to be part of an urban search and rescue but I also want to go to wildland fires. I want to go to the big ones that I read about.”
I'm a super fire nerd. I have a Biology background. The natural history of fire in the Western United States is something that speaks to me in terms of how species have evolved to burn and how species succession is dependent on fires of 100 years ago. The fires of this time, because they're burning so hot, is a different landscape as you know hiking out in those moonscapes. I was on the Caldor Fire. That whole landscape was like a nuclear annihilation of certain swaths of that forest. It is interesting from a scientific standpoint but a little bit worrisome from a residential and a tactical standpoint as a normal citizen of California.
If a big fire was my goal, California has helped me align that goal because of the era that we're in of mega-fires and what we've seen year in and year out. I know there were big fires but when I came on in Cal Fire in 1998, 1,000 acres was a big deal. This time, we're talking one million acres. It’s fire chewing up, acre after acre. Watching that behavior from a micro and a macro standpoint has been jaw-dropping, fascinating, and a little bit worrisome and troublesome.
Here we are, I'm a captain for Contra Costa County Fire. I've been on a USAR for about 6.5 years or 7 years. I slid over to the training division as a safety officer on a 48-hour shift so I am running to all the fires but doing the safety bit. We are doing a safety lap, collaborating with the IC, and doing the IC’s bidding. I took the battalion chief's test, which was one of my checkoffs. I wanted to be a battalion chief. It's something that I've always wanted because I was influenced by great servant leaders. I have known these battalion chiefs that were great leaders on the fire ground but also incredible facilitators of everybody else's growth. Not everybody is like that but I got lucky so I wanted to be a guy like that.
I'm an acting battalion chief. Who knows how long I'll be in that position? I'm trying to own it. I hope they leave me there and promote me eventually. The idea of taking strike teams out as a battalion chief strike team leader is enticing to me. I feel pretty young. I would like to have another nine lives in the fire service. That's me in a nutshell. I do a little surfing. I play some water polo to stay in shape. I chase my kids around and spend time with my family. That's my thing.
Chasing the kids around is a good PT program but you get to surf as well. That's not bad. I wanted to ask you. You alluded to it there but you said about how fire has changed in scope, scale, size, and intensity over the last few years. You've got all these years in fire so what have you seen over the years that have led up to this? Are there some trends that we're tracking? What's your opinion on it?
Let’s look at the bifurcation between the structural world and the wildland world. In the structure world, having done some reps in the Pacific Northwest in older homes, you had traditional construction. You spend a lot more time on a roof. Fire tended to behave in a certain way there. You had attic fires and basement fires because of balloon frame construction and things like that.
With the proliferation of things like IKEA and big-box stores where you can get a couch and all those things, there are a lot of petrochemicals in the fuel. Those fires are burning hot fast and they are moving quickly through a building. I saw a stat that said that back in the day with legacy fuels in the residential world, you had seventeen minutes to escape. This time, you have three as a citizen and an occupant. The same is true for flashover conditions and things like that. The smoke is volatile.
In the wildland world, I'd read about all these large mega-fires but they seem to be 100-year events. This trend seems to be aligned with every other climate catastrophe or climate event to stay neutral on that that these 100-year fires became 10-year fires or 5-year fires. Between 2015 and ‘16, from the Rim Fire to the Caldor Fire and the Dixie Fire, it has gotten bigger.
Although in California, especially Southern California, we’ve had those encroachment events into the residential world, whether it's Malibu, Santa Barbara, Berkeley, or Oakland from time to time, structure's a threat. It got to the point where I had a friend of mine who also went to the same high school that I went to. He's a captain in Ventura County. He is a very dynamic guy, a guy named Anthony McHale.
He called me once from one of his fires. He has this big, booming voice. He goes, “Throw all the tactics out the window. Everything you learned in the academy is out the window. These things are bigger. You got to draw a bigger box.” My takeaway as a captain or living in that Captain BC’s world is resources. That seems to be the thing that you're keeping in your back pocket to manage that.
The other thing I would say, because I dwell primarily in the wildland-urban interface world in addition to the urban world, is you would think, “Let's get a left flank and a right flank. Let's pinch around this fire.” Now, it is like, “Let's get that first alarm into the structures. Let's defend the structures and then we'll worry about the veg.” From where I am, it's a lot of light flashy fuel so that veg is over and well into the structures before a lot of resources can show up.
The traditional fire tactics that we're taught in textbooks many years ago are needing to be modified because things are moving so quickly and big. This is my empirical opinion. There might be a scientist that comes on your show and refutes what I say, and I'm open to that. I am always a lifelong learner. From where I live, there's a ton of Monterey pines. Those things are dead where they stand, about every 5th or every 10th tree, because of beetle bark and drought. If you go to the Sierra Foothills around Bass Lake, it looks like autumn on the East Coast but it's red with dead trees.
What I would want to test as a scientist is if those were allowed to burn every 15 years, 10 years, or whatever that interval is for that fuel package, would this still be the same? We're getting increasingly hotter temperatures. I worked in Antioch for the last couple of years. Triple digits were not a big thing but we are doing 110. We even got up to 115 a couple of times. That's in the Bay Area. It's the East end of the San Francisco Bay area so it does get hot but 115 is like, “What is happening?” That's like Las Vegas hot without the air conditioning.
Whenever I have this discussion with somebody, I try and take the climate change argument out of this. The reason why is because it's such a polarizing topic. Let's take the fire regimes that we're seeing. We've had two years back-to-back where it's been a slow start and haven't had a lot of fires, like big explosive fires. The fires that we are having are explosive, especially if they're not suppressed in that window. If it gets a holding and gets established, then it's off to the races and it is explosive growth. Let's remove climate change from that argument.
You said it yourself. These historic fire regimes where you're having these 100-year fires and they're happening with more frequency, that's where the human comes in. We've been suppressing these fires for far too long, over 100 years since the 10:00 AM policy, at least on the federal side. We have this overstocked force with too much competition. The beetle kill is easy to spread because there's no water compounded by the drought. It's like this cyclic positive feedback loop. It’s making it worse. The solution is fuel management. This is a wide range of topics. This is no one silver bullet or anything like that. It is fuel management and letting stuff burn.
From a political standpoint, that's where you can get alignment with maybe people that are across the table from you on political ideology. Maybe they don't agree with that scientific but once you start talking fuels management, it's like, “That's something we can both agree on. Let's start there.” I agree. That's what we're left with. Where I live, it's not like we're going to say, “We're going to do a nice little 20-acre burn. Let's rip it off.” It’s impossible whereas you talk about some different fuel management strategies. That's where we are.
You have to pull alongside people where they are. It's a good way to get consensus around the kitchen table, the fire station, and also from a political standpoint to where no one's pushing an agenda like, “You have to check this box as a climate change believer before I move forward.” It is like, “What are we going to do for the betterment of this community and try to restore health to this particular portion of land?” There are more things that we can agree on than polarize people. I agree. Having lived around the round table for many years, what is it? It's politics and religion.
Sports.
They're off the table for discussion.
It's weird though. I like taking it out there though. Everyone is on common ground. We have a problem. You have to be blind and not see this problem of explosive fires. Especially on the encroachment of the root. Everybody wants their little slice of heaven but also, you got to have that personal accountability to come in and manage your land. There is a risk with everything. When you're inclusive of everybody though, like your RCDs, regional foresters, loggers, or whoever and you're grazing allotments, if you're being inclusive of all these people like, “We need to take care of this,” it opens up a lot more doors to possible solutions. It's not a one-size-fits-all thing.
I say, “Walk in with your hands in your pockets.” It is like, “What do you guys think about this? This is what I'm thinking.” Sometimes, people will run with that. Sometimes, you can start some good, productive, constructive conversations around that versus walking in with a big old binder and saying, “This is what it says. This is gospel.” As we've probably seen in the last couple of years, I don't think Americans in particular react well to that. There's an alignment approach, a consensus, and a bridge-building approach. You get more bees with honey.
That's the thing too. It's being inclusive of all these people and taking their points of view into consideration. The last time that someone told Americans what to do, we threw a bunch of tea into a harbor. That's the leadership component that you're referring to, like the servant leadership and the leaders' intents. It is another important thing with all of humanity, even with you and me talking. Let’s say we're not even talking about fire. It's thought leadership. It is presenting a problem not like it’s a mandate like, “You must do this,” but is not married to your ideals and trying to form a conversation around some thought or idea. That'd be thought leadership.
I make a lot of sports analogies. It's like, “Can we get 3 yards on this down? If we can, let's do that and then we'll go for the long bomb further down the road.” I use that philosophy when I walk into the station for the first time with a brand-new crew. It's like, “Where are you at? What are your needs? How can I provide the best for your needs? Let's review and make sure we're all on board with the mission of the organization.”
I was fortunate enough to meet Alan Brunacini and hang out on the periphery of a lot of what he was doing primarily in the structural world. A lot of what he did with regard to the fire command models in Phoenix is based on a lot of the fire scope and incident command models that we have in California. I can say that safely that he used those models but the biggest thing that I took away from getting to hang out with him is that he called it M centered. What is the mission? The mission is not you or me. It's, “What is the mission right now?”
The mission could be, “Put the fire out. We need to bolster the station because it's not safe. We need to train more because we're not on the same page.” What is the mission? Can we all get aligned with the mission? When you do that and keep it mission-centered, egos seem to fall off to the wayside, or people that are ego-driven and insecure seem to check out and go somewhere else.
I'm lucky. In this battalion that I happened into that I'm managing, it feels like the egos are very chill. People are interested in hearing each other's ideas, tactics, and strategies. We're all willing to have a conversation. We've got a chance to test that in the drill environment. The attitude and effort are off the charts. I couldn't be happier.
It is that sense of gratitude of, “This is where we are. Maybe we don't have far to go to where we want to be.” It is to adopt the idea that we're always trying to get better as humans, firefighters, and leaders. It is an important thing to keep in your back pocket as a leader this, “I'm going to come alongside you and we're going to get better together,” philosophy. If you're excited about it, people also get excited about it.
It's empowerment. If you want to see someone excel at something, empower them to be the best version of themselves. It is that right there. That ties into self-leadership because if they want to be the absolute best, you instill that empowerment. If you empower them to be their best self, then they have self-leadership at that point. Everybody's aligned for this mission.
That's a whole leadership from the bottom thing. The best fire chiefs I've seen in my career have cultivated that. They are like, “You've got a great idea? That’s great.” I have seen some leaders who have been like, “Shut the hell up, new guy. Don't say anything.” I've seen leaders that are like, “You have a great idea. Put some meat on the bone and bring it back to me. I will help you get it across the finish line.” Those are the best leaders that recognize creativity at all levels.
Certainly, there are times to be a sea captain to be like, “This is what we got to do and there's no room for discussion. We have to do this now.” Those are those urgent moments. It is those moments when you're building that team, that team building and growth. Empowering those guys to lead from the bottom is an important leadership quality that I'm always trying to get better at as well.
Even the most unassuming person or the greenest person you can imagine could add something critical or profound to the situation and you never expect it. I love seeing that.
I do too. It's inspiring. I'm not sure if I should feel tired, sore, and this or that. I see these young guys and gals getting after it in our department. Our department has done a pretty good job of hiring pretty highly motivated folks that are taking their classes. They're bringing great ideas and also following our policies for the most part well. That inspires me to want to stick around. I could leave but I get inspired by that team atmosphere. I feel lucky to be a part of it.
Here's a thought experiment for you. The way I think of leadership is this nebulous thing. No one who's a true leader says, “I am a leader.” Have you ever noticed that?
Yeah.
It's this weird thing. We need to instill, especially for people that are coming into the fire service, that crash course in leadership and figuring it out. I wonder if there would be a way to instill that mentality of not an, “I am,” but, “I am a part of,” leadership context. To be a good leader, you have to be a good follower as well.
I still clean the toilets. I'm in the fire station and I'll still help with dishes. We're getting away from the hazing like, “Let's make the probies do the work.” We have a lot to deal with. We have bullets flying at us. We have cars with lithium-ion batteries that can electrocute you. I'm not saying that there shouldn't be rites of passage but that's what probation, the academy, and all the physical training are. In our academy, it's incredibly arduous.
I'm not saying to throw rose petals at these kids' feet but to show them, “I'm still doing this. It's important that this toilet is clean. I'm going to show you how to do it and then you're going to catch me doing it.” It seems like such a menial task. We all know that taking over a station after a shift leaves can also be a disgusting task but you throw yourself into it. Those other disgusting tasks that happen during EMS calls and things like that where you're willing to roll your sleeves up and get dirty with the crews is exactly what you're talking about.
There's a great book that I've started and I haven't finished. My wife makes fun of me because I have about eight books that I've started and I haven't finished. I got bad ADD. It's called Legacy. It's about the New Zealand All Blacks, the rugby team. They talk about that as a team idea. It's the most senior guys that are sweeping the floors of the locker rooms. If they're a guest at a different stadium, they're leaving that locker room cleaner.
It's like a dignity thing like, “We carry ourselves in this way. This is what this team is about. It's about dignity. It's recognizing everybody else's dignity. It's about not thinking so highly of ourselves that we don't have to do these things.” That's exactly what you're talking about. It is grabbing that broom and that mop because then, it's like, “It’s time to load the hose.”
I've been thrown out of the way so much by engineers and firefighters trying to get the hose out of my hands when we're loading it up. It's catchy. I learned that from the guys above me. Those captains that you had to chase down for a broom because they were sweeping the station, I admired them because they were badass on the fire ground too.
It’s like that book with the All Blacks New Zealand rugby team. They are one of the most domineering forces ever in rugby. Leaving a place better than you found it, you set a standard for a culture of being good and being a decent human. You don't have to gloat. You're already in the profession. Why brag about it? Everybody knows. You're the best team out there. Why gloat about it? Why be a prick? Why be hazing the new guy? It doesn't matter. It's like, “You earned your place. That’s cool. We'll take care of each other.” You have a cultural dignity.
It's important. I see a lot of fire departments adopting that informally or formally. Sometimes, a default can be like, “These Millennials or Gen Z-ers.” 95% to 97% of our workforce is waking up in the morning and saying, “I want to do a good job today.” They might veer off course a little bit and need a little bit of course correction but they certainly don't need to be ripped down because then, what do you get? You get someone that is going to be a robot. They're not going to think independently.
You've got someone that you're going to have to joystick for the entire rest of that time there. I want guys that are going to be able to execute directives but also think independently when I'm not around. That's that thing you're talking about. It is that amorphous leadership. I want them to go on and promote. I want them to climb above me. Every parent wants their kid to be better than they were. I carry that with me.
That is a good trait to have. A lot of people need to start picking those up. In 2023, I still hear about the shut-up-and-dig mentality. There's a time and place. Don't get me wrong. If it’s happening again, you need to get engaged. I get that. That's a different leadership style. That's another thing too. It's not like, “I am not a command leader or a verbal leader,” or whatever leadership nebulous term, you want to relate to or identify yourself with. Be a part of all of it. It's only going to make you a better human.
What sometimes people say is, “You're their buddy.” You’re not their buddy. You're trying to make the best example. You're embracing the mission and executing that mission. You're trying to set the pace and the tone for how to execute the objectives to complete that mission. You don't have to be a buddy, a friend, or a big brother. That's not where this goes. It's like, “This is how we do business. This is how business goes. We're going to be good humans about it. We're going to get after it. We're going to be enthusiastic.” That's the leadership motto of the day.
I don't want a mentor that I don't have the respect of. I don't want an assigned mentor. I want the person that's over there that's in the crap on a C. diff call and you have to peel a patient off the floor or something like that. It could be that there's somebody that's not even hesitating to hump the QD up the hill. That's what I want as a mentor.
Let’s roll it back to everything and how fire has changed and how we have these new integrations of tech, which I'm sure you've seen over the entirety of your career. It's always a new thing. It's the two things that firefighters hate. It's a change in the way things are first. How does tech play into this? Let's get into the Tablet Command thing. Take it away.
I am probably the least tech-tech cofounder that you'll ever meet in your life. My Cofounder, Will Pigeon, is the brilliance and the brains behind all of the actual technology playing out. I'm a pretty good drawer and that kind of thing. I'm a good representation of what your average Joe firefighter is, how they work, and how they think. Will has been great about challenging that as well and being like, “They can do a little bit more.” We are very yin and yang in a very good way that way.
Let me answer your question. Where does tech fit in the fire service? Tech has always fit in the fire service from the first time somebody slung an SCBA or put on a different helmet, fashioned a New York hook, or fashioned a McLeod or a Pulaski. At one point, it was forestry shovels, and then it was Mcleods and Pulaskis, which are mutations of lumberjack tools. The first time somebody put lug soles on a boot, that's technology. It adapting that to the fire service. Denim turns to Nomex.
The evolution of chainsaws?
100%. An ADD moment but a side note, the guy who wrote A River Runs Through It, his dad was a forestry firefighter. He wrote something called USFS 1917. I may be getting the authors wrong. We'll get a producer's correction on that or something.
Immediately jumps fire but he's written several books.
The USFS 1917 was an essay. It was one of my favorite essays about this kid who was a borough packer, like a mule packer but also a firefighter in the forest service in Montana in 1917. I think about all the tools that he had with him for fire. We look at something like Tablet Command. That's fixed in a fire engine. A lot of fire engines around California are starting to pop up around the United States and Canada.
The elegant stroke for technology in the fire service is to allow us to be the heroes that we perceive that we are, and I use that word intentionally, and to do our business aggressively while providing for safety. I'm also using that phrase very intentionally with small doses of information that make you safer and more situationally aware.
The first forays into technology were keyboard-based DOS and almost like a chicken pecking at a button to get the feed pellet. They were small bits of information. Sometimes, they were a little bit hard to access. Sometimes, you felt like you were doing it more for administrative data than you were to help you accomplish that objective of punching in a hose lay or putting the house fire out, or extricating the human from the crushed-up car.
I heard of an LA fire chief in LA County. I cannot remember who he was but it was at an NFPA conference on data. He said, “Give me what I want when I want it in tiny doses.” This was about 2015. We'd already conceptualized Tablet Command and we were out there in the space. It was a real deep dive and clear view into how most firefighters think and how they should think.
You cannot manage a fire whether as an incident commander or a first captain with your head down, looking for information. You can't do it. I've used this term before. I'm the first one to use it but I'm not positive. I call it at-a-glance technology. It is when you can glance at a device and say, “I got it. I know where I need to go.” You put that device down and you can get to work. That's the elegant stroke.
The further you move up in management, whether you are part of the command post, a safety officer, a division supervisor, or the incident commander, the more you can look down. The best technology out there is the technology that allows you to look down, grab a bunch of information in a very small amount of time, and then look up for long bits of time to watch the dynamics of your problem, whether it is a person hanging from the side of a building needing rescue, a person in a car flipped upside down, a fire running up into a neighborhood, or a second floor on fire in a four-story apartment complex. If you can grab those small bits of information and interpret that information.
As humans, we have evolved over the years to interpret little bits of information better and it's all about the interface. When we founded this company in 2009 maybe and we started discussing it in 2010-ish, I revealed myself to Will Pigeon, our Cofounder. I said, “I am not a ones and zeroes guy. If you ask me to program this, I can't do it.” He's a firefighter too so he got it already. It is, “Can we digest this in mass and put this information to use to where we are still acting the way that we perceive that we need to be acting under the umbrella of this 150-year tradition that we're all a part of?” It was, “What information can we give them at the time?”
Going to the origin story of Tablet Command, sadly, in Contra Costa County, tragically, we had two line-of-duty deaths in 2007. I'm sure you're aware of it. A lot of the fire community is aware of it. I had started my third fire department. I was a recruit in their academy in July of 2007 when this tragedy occurred but I had been in the fire service for about 8.5 or 9-ish years and had been in the structure world for a good solid 7.5 years.
I had been to that fire several times. That means most firefighters in the structural world have been into a single-family dwelling fire that's ripping with a rescue or even a non-rescue fire. You've been to that fire. There's a certain script that those fires are supposed to follow and that one did not follow the script. There were some curve balls with regard to how the information was disseminated and then how the response aligned with that. These guys put their lives on the line for citizens. It is what we've all taken the oath to do.
One of the things that came out of that was, “Are we doing personnel accountability as best as we could be doing, not only in Contra Costa County but in the region?” If you were to ask that question to the Fire Department USA, the answer coast to coast would be, “We could be doing a lot better.” At the time, we had an analog system that was working. I had come from a different department. There was a battalion chief that asked me about the system that we were using in Tacoma and Kent Fire. I went home to reproduce those materials for that chief.
Since I was sleep deprived of running calls all night the night before, incidentally, in the station where those guys had lost their lives, which was eerie and weird in itself, to show up to work at that station, there was a lot of gravity there. It rocks you to your core when you see families grieving for those reasons. It's terrible. To go and report to that same place of work is eerie.
Having run calls the night before and then pulling out my iPhone 2 at the time and playing the game called Words with Friends, which is where you grab a tile and move it over onto the Scrabble board that a lot of you are familiar with, I was having an a-ha epiphany moment. I arranged five tiles to spell Scout. I don't know what I spelled.
Some guy or gal that I don't even know arranged some other tiles to spell a word. We've been passing information back and forth. To me, immediately, that one-letter tile was an engine company. When you touch on that tile in Words with Friends, it grazes out and swells for a time. I'm like, “That thing has to be able to hold information, whether it's staffing, timing, assignments, or whatever it is.”
I started making drawings. That's when I called Will Pigeon, our Technical Cofounder, CEO, and CTO, and said, “I have a pretty good idea but I don't know how to get from butcher paper to an iPad.” The iPad 1 was maybe starting to be introduced into the market. I have a big imagination. I am a big fan of sci-fi movies. I had seen Minority Report where they are moving all those assets around on a big board.
I came from the teaching world and my wife was a teacher. There were smart boards and stuff where teachers could even move things around on a smart board. I was like, “There's no way that ten years from now, we're not going to have some sort of touch technology to take a crew from here staging and move them over to here in fire attack.” That was that epiphany moment of like, “I don't want to be the dude 15, 10 years, or 5 years from now that sees this technology and goes, ‘I had that idea and I did not do a thing about it.’” I wanted to be that guy that was like, “Let's do this and take ownership of this.”
I felt like I had some pretty good experiences as a firefighter. I'd worked in the wildland world with Cal Fire. I worked in the structural world. I am working in the county world, which is everything. Once Will and I put our heads together, in hindsight, it feels like it took off. It felt sometimes like we were banging our heads against concrete walls. We live close to Silicon Valley where they fling money around like it's nobody's business. Maybe there's a venture capitalist being like, “That's not true. We do our due diligence up here in Menlo Park.” They put money into things like Theranos without doing due diligence.
It is speculative gambling.
Sometimes, it's showmanship
You don't get into VC and start investing in a company unless you're going to have a 10X to 100X return. A big gamble is a big payoff.
That's a nice thing that you guys are trying to do for these nice little firefighters but I'm not interested. It was like, “Are we barking up the wrong tree with this?” We stuck to our guns and raised our money with some visionary and altruistic investors that believed in the idea of keeping their local firefighters safe through better information.
We talked about it earlier with these leadership hierarchies, shut up and dig, and all of that. It's true with information too. It's like, “What are you seeing up there, cap?” They are then like, “Shut up. I'll tell you when you need to know.” I've had firefighters in the back give me information from things like Tablet Command or hearing things on the radio that I didn't hear because I was doing captain-y things. Treating them like our most important asset and that they are also disseminators of information at appropriate times is important. A tool like Tablet Command helps firefighters do that.
Fast forward, we are in about 600-plus fire departments around the United States and Canada. We have a handheld version of the software. We're mounted as an MDT and response mapping navigation solution. In the spirit of this show and to put it in the wildland context, I was on the Caldor Fire in 2021 in the Division Lima Lima or Kilo Kilo.
Whenever you have double-letter divisions on fire, you know that fire is huge.
It was a big fire. We were on twelves too. I got to tell you, it was the first time I've ever been on twelves. I had respect for forest service people to begin with. If I could do it all over again, I would do 5 years or 10 years as a hot shot. Whether you're forest service, local government, BLM, BIA, or whatever you are, if you're out there hiking and digging, my hat is off to you. Those guys get up at 5:30 in the morning like me for the morning briefing. I know why you stay out there and sleep because it is such a grind.
Here we are in the structural world. We are like, “I need my relief in 7 days or 14 days,” and you guys are going 21 days. Do you want to know what a work ethic is? Go to the forest service. Go to any hand crew out there and you will learn work ethic. You don't need hazing or some false ritual. Take the tool and walk in there.
You don’t need hazing. The work environment is hazing enough.
Let's call it 100 degrees, a 32 degrees slope, and a 2-hour hike. There you go. There's your introduction and indoctrination. You're sleeping well at night. Back to the Caldor Fire, I was getting pulled aside for a morning briefing by a couple of different division sups saying, “Tablet Command is saving my ass out there. I'm seeing where all my units are with AVL. The mapping is being uploaded every morning. I'm getting a clear picture of what the fire's doing. I'm able to deploy my crews more efficiently.” That was great to get that context.
In the structural world, there are times when it matters where the actual apparatus is but there are times when the apparatus is here but the crew is over here so you have to track both. In the wildland world, it can be more important where that apparatus is. That might mean that they are on a structure protection assignment, a mobile attack assignment, or a patrol assignment, or they're pumping a hose lay. You can usually find crews maybe a couple of miles down a hose line from that rig. Having that for division sups was this unintended, excellent consequence of having bomber technology like AVL and up-to-date mapping. Even in areas where the cell coverage was bad, we were still getting that AVL technology to see where rigs were moving around.
Could you explain what the AVL is?
AVL is Automatic Vehicle Location. Those of you who are fans of NASCAR or Tour de France, if you want to go to the Euro route, a lot of times, they'll look at that clump of riders or drivers. They'll have almost like a cartoon caption pointing to like, “Here's so-and-so number 5, and here's so-and-so number 27.” You can differentiate out of that big clump.
Fire engines from most municipalities in California and around the United States usually carry some onboard modem that will beam a signal and say, “I am here.” That signal will manifest in some interface, whether it's a mobile data computer like an iPad, something like Tablet Command, or some other mobile platform that shows where units are in your agency.
The cool thing about Tablet Command is all these different agencies are on different computer-aided dispatch software. They're from all over California but they're putting the same signal up into the sky and landing on the Tablet Command interface. It is making that platform easy to read and decipher to see 2 fire departments from 2 different sides of the state on the same division and know what you have from a resource package. AVL is a rig tracker that will follow your rig wherever it goes.
I was curious what that was. For the folks reading this, not all of them are going to know what the acronyms are. I'm trying to get better at that. That's why I stopped you and was like, “What’s that?” The people that are reading that don't have a frame of reference, I like to inform them what that is. I’m sorry about that. Thank you.
Not at all. Please stop me at any time. Even I, the Luddite of the group, don't have all the terminology down. I don't know that I ever will other than ICS. There are some acronyms out there that are worthy of explaining in the name of safety, efficiency, and better management.
Resource accountability?
Yeah, 100%. We have two 12-person hand crews in our fire department which are great, hardworking kids. On their buggies, they have an onboard modem. They will project where their location is through AVL. You can see those buggies moving around. Twelve kids get off of those buses and they hike in and go to work. We can't track them based on where their buggy location is. We are starting to work on individual locations but that's much further down the road in the product roadmap.
That's one of the things with the Feds though. Every hotshot crew, do they have to have a spot on board? It's part of their standards from a standard outfit. That's what your kid is. That's what every buggy, engine, or whatever is. You have to have a spot. That's like a geo-locating GPS satellite. They can call in case of an emergency. What do they call the things on the structure side where it's an emergency alert and it automatically pings?
It's a PASS alarm. It is a personal accountability system.
That's another thing though. For the individual hotshots out there, a lot of them don't want to be tracked. That's one thing that I've always been confused about. Hide the hotshot's a real thing sometimes.
It is true in the structure world too. When we introduced Tablet Command, people were like, “This thing tracks me? I don't want it.” What happens is people don't want to be scrutinized. They're afraid of punitive action versus a more complete picture. Whether you're a hotshot and lacing up the boots or you're pulling your boots on as a structure firefighter, I still think that 150 to 200 years of tradition plays into that. It is getting that level of trust to say, “This is not so that the big boss can come down and punish you for something that he thinks that you should be doing. This is so that if you suddenly scream a mayday, we can come and get you.”
It is the same thing as the other direction as well. At least on the wildland side for us, a lot of apprehension comes from it. I've seen it before. It comes from the fact that some people will hop on a mountaintop remote camera system, look at the fire, armchair quarterback the incident, and do ICE from the armchair. That's scary.
That's important for us as firefighters across the board to understand that you have to be there. That mountaintop camera that you referenced or that piece of AVL information that you are looking at on the Tablet Command platform or any other platform, you still need to be on the fire ground. This is not a drone operation from Las Vegas. This is real people on the ground managing real dynamic problems.
Fire is a very tactile sport. I don't have any basis in saying this for the structure side of things or the municipal side of things or all-risk. From the wildland side, I can 100% guarantee you that there's an intuition that's developed over the course of your time. You take a dialed burn boss. They're an artist and their paintbrush is a drip torch. You can't replicate that. You have to be there to understand that.
That's reps. They talk about that. Gary Klein talks about Recognition-Primed Decision Making. Those are all slides in your internal slide tray that you're drawing from personal experience. When you do look at that badass burn boss’ eyes, you know that they know what's going on. They are confident and grounded in their decision-making. One of the reasons we know is because maybe they're acting a little bit more conservatively than we thought that they would because they've seen things go awry. All of that Recognition-Primed Decision Making is so important. That only comes from being there and building that experience for yourself. There's no getting grounded.
You got to feel it. When you start trying to ICE from a distance, you got to sometimes step back and get the whole picture. Sometimes, you have to be up close and understand what's going on, especially when it comes to accountability for resources. That's where I see a lot of the utility. That is huge with Tablet Command. The classic question is, “Where is my water tender?”
We have something in the structural world that I'm sure can apply to the wildland world. I'm sure there's a wildland world equivalent called the NIOSH 5. Those are the five causal factors. If you look at any line of duty death across the United States in any year, 1 of those 5 causal factors, if not several of them, were in play when those firefighters got severely hurt or injured.
Communication is one of the keys but accountability is one of the other big ones. When you lose accountability and you lose track of your people, you lose control of the incident. When you're losing control of the incident, that's when those accidents start to pile up or that's when those factors start to align that have bad outcomes. In our mutual case, it's the line of duty desks. It's usually because of communications.
Not to be disrespectful at all but I can think of a few major wildland incidents where communications were a major factor. There are whole books written about that. Out of respect for those incidents, I don't want to say, “It was on this fire and that fire.” Not to sound like an armchair quarterback but communication is huge. Communication is huge in the structural world. It is like you said, “Where is everybody?” It's not like, “Where is everybody? I want my burritos.” It is like, “That cloud changed. That behavior changed. My lips are dry. The relative humidity is single digits. I know it with my fingertips. Things are about to go bad or they're going bad.” It is not the time to figure out where everybody is.
It is like, “I want to prep everybody or know in my mind and then verify that on some interface where everybody is in real-time.” That's what Tablet Command brings to the game. You are writing this crap down anyway. You're putting it on a whiteboard or notepad. You're using a grease pencil on a napkin or the back of the envelope. Why not timestamp it and memorialize where everybody is? Even when things go well, you've got these analytics to refer to and say, “That went well. Let's build on that.”
It's passive. You're not changing how you get on and off the fire engine. You're not changing the PPE that you wear and your tactics. You're not being more defensive instead of offensive. You're building a picture of what the incident looks like so you have a good idea of where that incident goes so you can get ahead of the incident. That's the most important thing.
I'm 50% sure that we can stop it with the resources that we have but if these other factors align that are out of my control, what do I do? Is it time for Cowboy Bill? No. You need those resources in your back pocket in case things go horribly sideways. That tenant can be applied to the structural world and the wildland world. You can't know unless you have some interface that's keeping up with the incident and telling you who you have. That's a big advantage of Tablet Command.
Even for guys that are technology averse, one of the very first things you do in Tablet Command is open the incident and it gives you a long display of who is coming. If that's all you do and then you write it down, you won because you didn't get on the radio, tie up bandwidth, and ask for this two-minute long list of every resource from Santa Barbara to San Francisco of who's coming to your party. You're winning because you're seeing it there in real-time for the most part. It gives you the ability to place them on a map and timestamp what they're doing. At least if something goes sideways, you can refer back to that.
Scenario time. The way you see this being useful is that scenario you alluded to right there. Let’s say you notice a change in RH, the wind shifts, or the column starts coming back at you or going toward a community. You know the fire's going to be running that way. Since you've already noticed this change in the environment, you are like, “What do I do with my resources? Do I got to go do point protection?” It is that speed of information. You're not overwhelming.
You mentioned too that a lot of things are flooding you with information. Look at Instagram. How many times do you know people that are taking a dump in the morning and they're doom scrolling while they're taking a dump or they're going to bed doom scrolling? It's so much information but it's so concise that it's easily digestible. You don't even have to read the caption. You know what's going on. When you can glance down and say, “We need to do point protection,” and you can get that information quickly, then you can read your resources. You're getting ahead of the curve. That's huge.
To pan back for a second, when I took fire department tests many years ago, there were 5,000 or more people lining up. There are not that many people lining up this time. I know the forest service and the hotshot crews are having a hard time hiring. That used to be hard. It is hard to get people that can do the job to that standard and be motivated to stay in it.
The same is true for Cal Fire and a certain extent in the structure world. We don't have a gazillion people coming to these things because of budgets or drawdowns. In the era where we are with mega-fires and a bunch of different activities, you might not have a whole lot of resources at your new start in Weed California, Willows, or Gold Run. It's like, “Who do I have and where can I position them to where they can do the best they can but that's realistic for the resources that we can expect in the next while?”
Having an interface in that Instagram packaging, it’s like, “I am looking down. I've got the picture. You go down that road. You do your best to get parallel with the head of the fire and I'll get you resources as soon as they show up.” If they show up and they didn't show up on your interface, you can add them. You know who you have for the next assignment or that you know you need to hang onto and add to the IAP.
The bigger thing that you asked about was how technology works for our profession, which is a subtext 200 years old and very traditional. That's how it works. It's those small snippets of technology that we have every day of our lives. We're looking at it in different ways. We're navigating to that five-star speakeasy, looking for the best poke bowl, or whatever it is. You're digesting it and taking action. You can do that in the fire service without it being a trivial thing.
It can be a meaningful thing when the technology is packaged correctly, which is why we have a lot of firefighters working for our company to say, “That's a little too nerdy. That's going to take too many steps to get that information. Let's look at it this way.” Thankfully, our CTO and Cofounder is also a former firefighter and did the job for real for several years so he's got a good command of that. He's also a whiz kid when it comes to ones and zeroes.
Programming is not my thing either.
Computer sciences were never something that excited me.
That makes things convenient though. That's one thing. It’s whatever you can do, especially with something that you could see your incoming resources. Let’s say it’s a PL-5 and resources are not coming. You can even adjust your efficiencies to put the best effective resource at this particular location and keep track of all that stuff.
That's a fantastic way of putting it. You put that in a good way. You adjust your expectations and resources for the maximum amount of efficiency. That's exactly it. You and I both have a front-row seat to this new era of fire. There are times when you have to do a lot with very little. It’s like the Marines in World War II, make do. Having affordable technologies to help you do that is critical to success and safety in an operation.
You are not beta testing. It's a product. It's already out there. It's disseminated. It's a turnkey thing. The cool thing is that you have firefighter input on this. They're going to tell you if a feature is useless or shitty. They're probably not going to pull any punches but you get that feedback on what is effective.
I've got a great story about that. I have his permission to use his name. He would want it. He was a Division Chief in the city of San Francisco. His name is Tom Siragusa. He is a very well-respected thought leader and incident commander, at least on our side of the bay looking across. He has been on panels and Firehouse Magazine and Firehouse World. He has taught a lot of classes. It is years and years of experience. He is Italian. I'm Italian. He is not going to pull any punches.
When Will and I conceived this technology, we launched it in the app store in 2013. We were getting a lot of traction. We launched it at a conference first and then a trade show about two weeks later. The conference was supposed to be a room for 40 people and there was 100 outside. They were overflowing that had come to see, “Is this really a thing?”
We were feeling pretty good about that. We featured it at Firehouse World, which was this big conference. We had fire chiefs come by and were like, “You nailed it but this and this. Write that down.” We were like, “Yes, sir,” and wrote it down diligently. We were having some success in fits and starts but collectively, Will and I decided, “We should decide if we're wasting our time.” We were having a hard time finding funding from the technology world. We had a civilian CEO at the time. He doesn't talk the fire talk.
He doesn't speak the language.
Also, the abrupt feedback in various ways. We said, “We know this guy Tom Siragusa. He's a Division Chief in San Francisco. He is well-respected. He's an up-front guy. He's going to tell us whether we can get on with our lives, and this was a nice concept, and somebody else will do it better, or we should continue down this journey.”
We walked into the room. He had another meeting going. He was trying to get away from that. He walked in in a rush. He was an important man that had a lot of other things to do. Here we are, the county firefighters from across the bridge with this technology on our arms. I'm verbatim quoting him. He goes, “Sit down. Show me your work. I'm going to tell you exactly what's wrong with it.”
The civilian CEO, I looked at him and his mind was blown. He was like, “Is this how you guys talk to each other?” I was like, “Relax. This is going to be exactly the feedback that we need.” We started getting through it and he was looking at us with a skeptical eye like, “Go on.” In the end, he was like, “You guys nailed it but it will never be in the city of San Francisco.” Three months later, we're in the city of San Francisco. It was good to get that abrupt feedback, which was also supportive.
You got to do that in any venture. Whether you're drilling as a captain or a battalion chief, you got to go to people that you know and are going to poke you in the chest figuratively and say, “You’re blowing it. That was good but C plus. I'd like to see you be better at this particular aspect.” If you seek that out and that self-examination, whether you're launching a product or you're trying to take the next promotional step, those are important moments to look back inside yourself and say, “Am I invested in this thing?” It’s an interesting little story.
That's another thing too. I don't pull any punches on the show. It’s the authenticity thing. When it comes to talking to “normies” or normal people, I don't think that a lot of people are prepared for them to be that direct. It's pretty much universal, whether it's cops, Military, or firefighters. We all speak the same language. We're very short. We're direct and to the point. It's not us being a jerk. You’re not prepared for that level of honesty and directness.
I'll accept the jerk moniker when the time is right. I’ll sometimes gladly wear that crown. I'm not trying to be mean. I'm saying, “If you want to do this, this is what it needs to look like.”
You have to be humble. That's with anything, whether you're developing an app or a product, or if you're trying to be a better firefighter, a better human, or a parent. It doesn't matter.
We would've gone nowhere if we had not adopted that stance of humility. We're walking into fire departments that have very proud traditions, whether you're talking to the US Forest Service, the BLM, Cal Fire, Charlotte, North Carolina, Denver, Colorado, San Francisco, LA County, or Ventura County. All these departments are very proud of what they do. They're proud of their people and their organization. I'm proud to belong to this larger community but I'm also proud of my agency and the folks that work for me. I'm proud to be a part of that. I feel grateful to be a part of that. You got to have that humble stance when you're introducing things that people maybe are not necessarily comfortable with.
The fire culture is a very giving and give-back kind of culture. It doesn't matter if you're structure or wildland. Is this one of those efforts and one of those personal passions to give back to the community that has been a part of your life for so many years?
Yeah. I never want to hear another mother or wife weep in a memorial service again. Are we going to prevent all of that? We can try. It's probably not realistic but we are trying to add our piece to this culture in terms of making the information more readily accessible, elevating situational awareness, and making it safer. We've gotten some pretty impactful feedback from some agencies that have said, “If not for Tablet Command, this might've had a bad outcome.”
We have a documentary on our website about Marin County when they were up at the car fire. They were caught mid-slope in the middle of a blowup. I'll leave it at this. Tablet Command played a pivotal role in that successful outcome. Was it everything? No. That's going too far to say that but it was an important tool. I'll leave it to you to go to those people, watch that documentary, and decide whether that had an outcome. Did it prevent maybe four funerals for that department? Maybe.
I have a good friend of mine from the National Fallen Firefighters Foundation, Victor Stagnaro. He is a wonderful man who was running the firefighter outreach for widows and orphans. One of his takes on Tablet Command years ago was, “You may never know how many lives you've impacted with this because so early in the process, information was disseminated that affected the outcome.”
Do we have an after-action form that says, “Tablet Command saved my life,” no. If you survey our users, which I don't even want to call customers because they're our fellows, in terms of the information that they're getting, they would agree that they're getting information that they've never had before in the palms of their hands.
Can we enhance the incident command process? Can we enhance get-out times, which is better for the citizens and us? If we can keep fires small, whether it's residential or wildland, that's good too for the citizenry. Can we make navigation more accurate? Can we give bits of information like a fire camera view or a traffic camera view, or directions to a fire trail more readily accessible in a three-ring binder?
We are very fortunate and grateful that we've had a tremendous base of users from unique fire departments like Columbus, Ohio, Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Santa Barbara County co-collaborating with us along the way and helping us make this product better. Here's the thing. A lot of technology companies go, “We are making the world a better place.” It is like, “I get it.”
I don't know how many times I've heard that sentence. You're right.
Silicon Valley, the series riffed on that. It’s overdone. I feel very proud to be a part of a group of people that has made a big impact on the fire service. I am confident in saying that we have made a pretty important impact on the fire service in terms of raising expectations about what information you should go into a situation and be armed with that information. I'm proud of that.
I am very thankful to Will, our CTO and CEO, the guy with regard to his technology, his command of technology, and his ability to roll that out to fit the fire service culture. That is an elegant stroke in itself. I am thankful for the team that's working for him. Our team of people that get out there and evangelize this product are all retired or current firefighters from around the country. They're paired with folks that have been selling products in this realm for a long time. They're very proud to also be a part of that as well. I'm confident we are making an impact in the fire service. That is a way for us to give back to see if we can maybe impact injuries in the line of duty deaths and make that number go smaller.
It all stems from reducing that fog of war too. When you get onto an incident, it doesn't matter if it's a TC, wildland, or a structure. There's still some chaos there. Your whole job is to manage the chaos. It doesn't matter what level you're at. You're still managing chaos as the firefighter backseater. It doesn't matter. To reduce that fog of war and get a clearer picture and not be flooded with all the information, and then have the ability to look down, add a glance, look at what you have, and then connect the dots at a rapid pace, there is no doubt in my mind that's going to save lives potentially.
We are practicing it every day that we're in our civilian lives with menial stuff. I love that you introduced the fog of war because that's exactly what it is. Part of what we do is brave that initial onslaught of confusing data inputs in what's real and what's not. Do we lose our minds or do we go about it in a very rehearsed, professional, and controlled way to mitigate and make that emergency better? Having that information to cut through the fog of war is important.
What is the future of Tablet Command looking like? Can you go into it?
The future is big. There are a lot of features that are on our product roadmap that I probably will keep the veil over out of respect for the developers and our CTO/CEO. Everything that you've done in the analog world with regard to managing divisions, groups, or a unified platform for managing multiple resources from multiple locations on a large incident, whether it's a flood, tornado, hurricane, or a large mega-fire, we're getting much closer to that than anybody has ever gotten with regard to how easy it is in the interface.
There are a lot of keyboarding solutions out there and stuff but we're going to take that same Tablet Command interface that everybody is used to and continue to make it easier with richer information and make the platform bigger so that more people can play in that sandbox and we can keep track of more people. In my agency, we have resources that come from different counties and they are Tablet Command customers.
The ability to leap from platform to platform is important, especially in the West. I have the Western goggles on. The Midwest has something called MABAS. It is the mobile box alarm system, which is like our mutual aid system. You can have fire departments that normally would not play with each other starting to play with each other. Some of that comes from California's influence.
You can have swaths of tornadoes that cross multiple states. With the way that we have deployed the FEMA Task Force from all over the country to different parts of the world to unite in efforts to dig people out or save people from the water or neighborhoods that have been flooded or burned over, the ability for firefighters to get onto a unified platform of information, we're getting closer to that.
With Tablet Command, we are looking to expand our footprint in the United States and Canada. We have gotten a lot of interest from beyond. We are looking to keep the product real with regard to what our true users tell us about their experience and how can we make that experience better. The future is big and bright for Tablet Command. None of us are getting tired. We're excited when we get to interact with future users because we're all coming from the same industry. We can talk shop, get unified on all the things that we have in common, and also be curious about the differences from different parts of the country.
Texas has wildfires. Florida has wildfires. How is it managed there? What's their approach to the incident command system? How do they go from managing wildfires in the Florida panhandle to then managing a high-rise fire? Are there crossovers? How many similarities do we have? Seeing all of that manifest in the Tablet Command platform is important as well. We're not going to stop innovating, trying to grow, and listening. We love our users and we want to continue to listen to them. We want to expand our user base. The future is big and bright for us.
For the people that are out there interested and reading the show, is there an open beta for stuff that you're testing out or new features? They can go to the internet and it's all there but as far as other stuff, where can we find you?
You can download our free version of the app, which is a very basic version to give you a sense of how to launch an incident and build an incident that's timestamped. We’ll build a list of resources and track those. One of the great things about Tablet Command is it generally takes policies and procedures from Fire Department USA with regard to the management of a bunch of different types of hazards, whether it's an MCI, hazardous materials, residential structure fire, wildland fire, or whatever it is.
In the free version, you have to manually build that but it will give you that look and feel of what that looks like for a full fire department deployment. In a full fire department deployment, it is all those laminated checklists and 3-ring binder stuff that you have in your cab coming together on 1 platform that you're holding in the palm of your hand. Certainly, downloading the free app is one way to experience the look and feel.
One of the other ways is to go to our website, TabletCommand.com. There are a ton of videos and customer testimonials that you can view. That Marin County documentary is called One Day in July. For all of you wildland heads out there like myself and Brandon, it's for sure a great documentary about how in this 200-year tradition of fighting wildland fires, we were able to use technology to maybe provide a launching point for a successful outcome for firefighters whose day was about to go bad. That's a pretty compelling eight-minute documentary.
Certainly, we're on all the social media channels. On LinkedIn, we have some of our more white paper style publications, and then Instagram and Facebook. We even crop up on Twitter. You might go to that fire department in your city, look inside a fire engine, and might see Tablet Command. Depending on where you are in the country, you might be living right next to a Tablet Command customer or user as well. Those are the ways that you can start to get the feel. We have a great group of folks that will give you a personalized demo of the product. We always love to hear from interested prospective customers. That's another way to interact with Tablet Command.
It’s an intuitive user interface and very well done. I got in there, poked around a little bit, and checked it out. It's easy to use. That's three-quarters of the battle right there, especially when it documents stuff.
It’s the litmus test. It's got to be firefighter Joe proof, like, “I'm sliding this here and checking that off there. I'm putting it aside so I can watch the fire and pick it up again.” It's got to be easy to use and intuitive. If you handed it to a fire professional that has maybe never seen Tablet Command, they pick it up right away.
As long as it has not a destructive purpose or element to it to where you can focus on the stuff that matters but still have these additional tools to get that information that reduce that fog of war and all that stuff, I'm all about it. Anything that's going to make our jobs better, more efficient, and safer as better humans, I am 100% into it.
Whether we know it or not, if we can reduce those memorials, line-of-duty deaths, or severe injuries, then our work is important. We want to continue to do important work.
I appreciate you being on the show and telling us all about your story, what you do, and Tablet Command. It's interesting to see the rise in tech. I don’t know about everybody but a majority of firefighters out there, usually, when they hear tech and fire used in the same sentence, they typically cringe. It’s refreshing to see a fresh spin on things and something that's purpose-driven and increasing safety. It's not a crappy thing.
We can have the technology and have it be real for what we're doing. The future is here in that respect. That's something that we're proud of. It's because we have a team that's largely built to fire service people. We're committed to making things real, usable, practical, and applicable to what we do every day in the field.
Keep going in the direction you're going because I'm sure it's not going to be 100% successful with that mentality.
We'll do a follow-up in a little while.
Coming up at the end of the episode here, I always have the opportunity for you to give a shout-out to some homies, heroes, or mentors. Who do you have for us?
I've got such a long list. First of all, let's start with everybody at Tablet Command. The whole team is amazing. We have our Cofounder, Will Pigeon. He is our CEO and CTO. The list is up to about 15 or 16 other people. Many thanks to the folks that I worked with at Cal Fire but also Puget Sound Fire. One of our coworkers, Eric Tomlinson, has come over to Tablet Command and is working with us. He had a profound impact on my whole fire career.
Thanks to the Tacoma Fire Department, training staff there, and all of my peeps at Tacoma. I will never forget my time there. Contra Costa County has been a supportive environment. My academy classmates of Academy 41, my life is complete having gone through that adversity with you. You all know what I mean by adversity. Alan Brunacini, rest in peace, had a big impact on me, as well as Kevin Conant and Anthony Kastros who is an incident command guru. My parents, rest in peace as well, were always encouraging me to go after things like this. I know they were proud but also nervous when I became part of the American Fire Service.
Lastly, my wife and kids. My brothers and sisters as well. I've got six brothers and sisters. I'm number seven. Thanks to them for being there for me as a tight Italian crazy family, as well as all my extended relatives. Thanks to my wife and kids who have supported me for sometimes being away and have done their best to understand what this mission is about. With that gratitude, I will gladly take a bullet and do whatever I can to make sure that they're okay. I have a lot of people to be grateful to. I hope I show gratitude to everyone mentioned and everyone not mentioned as well. Thanks for the opportunity.
Andy, thank you for being on the show. I am looking for more of what's going on in Tablet Command's future here pretty soon. I appreciate it.
Thanks for doing what you do and for having me. It's been an honor. I'm always happy to come back. We appreciate being here.
We'll get you back on. Take care.
Good luck this season. Stay safe, okay?
Will do.
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There we go. Another episode of the show is in the books with our good friend, Andy Bozzo, over at Tablet Command. If you want to find out more about Tablet Command and what it's all about, it's a mobile CAD software emergency incident response and management solution. It's pretty awesome and easy to go to. All you got to do is go over to www.TabletCommand.com. Check it out and see what it's all about. It's intuitive and super easy to use. It's awesome.
Andy, I want to say thank you for swinging by and telling us all about the show. Playing Words with Friends and creating something that could pretty much conceptually change the entire way we visualize resource management on fires, who would've known playing video games would've been a segue into creating some beneficial and safety-enhancing tech? I want to say thank you for telling your subject matter expertise and telling us a little bit about yourself. We’ll see you on the next one.
As for the rest of you, I know everybody's getting a little bit bored. The season is probably going to end up dragging on but keep your head in the game. It's hard, especially in these slow seasons. We're one lightning-bust away from a ripping end of the season but we'll see how it goes. Let's see what Mother Nature provides. I hope everybody's doing well. I hope you enjoy the show.
A special shout-out to our sponsors. We got Mystery Ranch, purveyors of the finest packs in the wildland fire game, and the creators of the Backbone Series scholarship. Go over to www.MysteryRanch.com to check out their full line of load-bearing essentials and get a hold of one of those awesome opportunities to get some professional development under your belt with the Backbone Series scholarships.
We Hotshot Brewery, purveyors of the finest coffee in the wildland game and keeping me extraordinarily caffeinated, especially with my two kids. They keep me up. I need a little bit of extra juice to go. If you want the finest in coffee for a cause, go over to www.HotshotBrewing.com and check it out.
Last but not least, we have The Smokey Generation AKA The American Wildfire Experience. Go over to www.Wildfire-Experience.org and check out all the stories that have gone back to the 1940s. It is pretty rad. Bethany, you have a kick-ass organization. Keep it up over there.
A special little shout-out to everybody who's reading this because you, whoever is reading this, are making this whole thing possible. We rolled over 500,000 downloads at the end of July 2023. I am deeply appreciative of this. I cannot thank you all for your unwavering support. Thank you so much. Other than that, all of you know the drill. Stay safe. Stay savage. Peace.
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Big Ernie Pack
Talk Box 5000
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www.Wildfire-Experience.org
The Smokey Generation
Tablet Command
Legacy
A River Runs Through It
One Day in July
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