“This is one of the greatest professions in the world — if not the greatest. Don’t expect it to be handed to you on a silver platter.”

Captain Andy Bozzo, Contra Costa County Fire Protection District

Why did you become a firefighter?

When Captain Andy Bozzo was just five years old, he saw the mountainside near his home go up in flames. This was his first exposure to firefighting and he was already hooked. Seeing all of the personnel come together for that effort fascinated young Mr. Bozzo.

He became enthralled with the science of fire and the logistics of mitigating it. Bozzo wanted to be one of those brave people he saw fighting the common enemy of fire. Despite his desire to fight fire, Captain Bozzo’s performance in school led him down a different path.

Bozzo excelled in class and sports in high school. With great grades and an opportunity to swim at the prestigious University of Southern California, he went to college to continue his education after high school. With a college degree under his belt, he decided to put his education to work as a science teacher. When he had to get his master’s degree to advance his teaching career, he thought that would be the perfect opportunity to quench his passion for firefighting. He fought summer fires with CAL Fire between master’s school semesters.

“I thought that would satisfy my desire to fight fires, but it did the opposite. That desire wasn’t going away.”

The plan was to go back and teach after he got tired of firefighting. Twenty-four years later, he’s still in the fire service. Today, he serves as a captain for the Contra Costa County Fire Protection District and he doesn’t plan to leave the fire service any time soon. Captain Bozzo also founded TabletCommand — an incident management and response software that saves firefighters’ lives.

What advice do you have for other firefighters?

Find mentors and ride along to figure out what actually goes on, and above all else —persevere. Nothing replaces the experience of making mistakes and the humility that comes along with it.

“In any endeavor, you’ll have moments where you will just flat out fail.”

Captain Bozzo wants young firefighters to understand that failure is part of the journey, but it should never stop them from pursuing their goal to becoming a great firefighter. Each mistake brings an opportunity to learn and build resilience.

“This is one of the greatest professions in the world — if not the greatest. Don’t expect it to be handed to you on a silver platter,” Captain Bozzo stated. Young firefighters shouldn’t be afraid to skin their knees or split open their chin along the way. That’s what makes the profession so great in Captain Bozzo’s opinion.

What challenges and rewards have you encountered while launching Tablet Command?

“If someone told me 15 years ago that I would start TC, I would’ve told them that they’re nuts.”

Being a full-time firefighter and father, Bozzo was pretty sure that he would be surfing with any spare time he had. But in 2012, he added another role to his list of responsibilities: entrepreneur.

Captain Bozzo co-founded Tablet Command with his colleague, Assistant Chief Will Pigeon. Pigeon has since retired from the fire service to focus on Tablet Command full-time while Captain Bozzo maintained his role with Contra Costa County Fire.

The hardest thing about starting Tablet Command for Captain Bozzo has been communicating his vision to others for support. Even though he could see the end goal clearly, others challenged him to support his assumptions with empirical data. He had to learn how to share his vision in a statistically compelling way so that people without his experience and vision would buy into the idea.

One of the greatest rewards that Tablet Command has given Captain Bozzo is the chance to network with firefighters throughout the U.S. and abroad. He has enjoyed learning different strategies and tactics that fire departments in different utilize to be more effective.

What changes do you foresee in the fireservice?

With the fire service becoming more complex, Captain Bozzo has noticed that firefighters are having to become more specialized. “It’s like college,” Bozzo drew the comparison. “You have to major in something.”

The materials used to build houses have changed drastically in recent years. It used to take 17 minutes for a fire to overtake a house. Today, with oriented strand board (OSB) and other new materials, many house fires are fully involved in 3 minutes.

In addition to faster-burning house fires, wildland fires are becoming more prevalent. For Captain Bozzo and the rest of California this is an extremely pressing issue.

“You’re going along with your day as usual and then, boom: you need to hop in a truck and get to the next county because they’re about to lose an entire city to a wildfire.”

For Captain Bozzo, it’s an honor that people call the fire department for every emergency from a cat in a tree to a train derailment to a poisonous snake bite. This wide range of calls requires interdepartmental communication sometimes though and that’s when things can get dangerous for the firefighters.

Communication is oftentimes the biggest difficulty with interagency cooperation. That’s why Bozzo and the team at Tablet Command are so passionate about delivering their product to fire agencies everywhere. Facilitating standardized communication is mission critical and it can save lives.

This video tells the story of how Tablet Command saved firefighters’ lives during the Carr Fire in Redding, CA.

Before joining Contra Costa County, Andy Bozzo worked for Tacoma Fire Department in Washington. At that department, he was on an engine company that ran over 4,100 calls per year.

During that time, he went to Washington D.C. with his daughter and they visited a fire station. The D.C. fire department union was Local 36 and Bozzo’s department union in Tacoma was Local 31. The D.C. firefighters were impressed at that since it meant the Tacoma Fire Department established their union prior to the D.C. department doing so.

Riding the wave, Bozzo proudly informed the D.C. firefighters that he goes on a lot of working fires and that he rode an engine that ran over 4,100 calls each year. They smiled and replied, “Oh you mean like this truck right over there that runs 5,600 calls per year?”

Bozzo paused as he began to digest the slice of humble pie that the D.C. firefighters had just served him.

“That taught me an important lesson: there’s always someone who has more experience than you.”

The more experience Captain Bozzo has accumulated, the more humility he has gained. “You can get lost in 40 square-foot kitchen [during a fire], no problem,” Bozzo pointed out. “It’s embarrassing, humiliating, and it can happen to the best of us.”

Captain Bozzo credits the humility he has gained throughout his career for his ability to continue to excel as a firefighter and an entrepreneur.

In 2017, Captain Bozzo went on the first wine country fires. A division supervisor said to him “you guys need to hold this road or we’re going to lose the entire town of Calistoga.” That opened his eyes to what California was in for with wildfires over the years ahead.

Bozzo combines his experience with the humility he’s gained to make sure he stays vigilant in even the most mundane of times.

It’s most important to take care of your crew and keep track of them during those seemingly innocuous and mundane times. As a captain, he is responsible for ensuring his crew makes it home to their significant others safely after each shift.

“Those experiences reminded me how important it is to stay sharp all the time. It can really bite you if you’re not careful.“