Santa Clara Fire Department

Santa Clara Fire Department traces its roots to 1854, when residents formed the volunteer Columbia Hose Company. Additional volunteer companies followed over the next several decades until they merged into a single fire department in 1908; the city built its first fire station and hired its first paid firefighters in 1949, followed by its first paid chief in 1951.

Today SCFD operates nine fire stations (a tenth is in the design phase) and a training center, staffing 8 engines, 2 truck companies, a rescue apparatus, a Type 2 hazmat apparatus, a transport ambulance, and battalion chief and training vehicles with 173.5 paid positions, 137 of them in the Field Operations Division. A full-time force is supplemented by an active volunteer/reserve program that logs thousands of hours of community service annually.

The department is organized into Administration, Field Operations, Emergency Medical Services, Community Risk Reduction, and Training divisions, and answers over 10,000 calls a year — roughly 79% medical, 10% alarm activations, 2% fires, 1% hazmat, 1% technical rescue, and 7% other. Beyond city limits, SCFD sends engines on statewide wildfire mutual aid and fields specialists (rescue, medical, hazmat, operations) on FEMA's California Task Force 3 urban search-and-rescue team. It protects a mix of occupancies that includes Levi's Stadium, Santa Clara University, Mission College, the Santa Clara Convention Center, Westfield Valley Fair Mall, several high-rise hotels, and numerous Silicon Valley tech company headquarters, with Highway 101 running through the city and Highways 880, 280, and 237 on its borders.

SCFD hires entry-level Firefighter I candidates through a competitive process run with the city's Human Resources Department and CPS HR; recruitment, testing, and process updates are posted on the department's dedicated JoinSCFD.org recruiting site. As of the site's last update, the most recent hiring cycle's written exam and oral board interviews were complete, the eligible list was certified 11-19-2025, and Fire Chief interviews were targeted for February 2026.