ALUMNI SPOTLIGHT | GARY BLOOM
‘Find Them Quicker’ by Pat Pemberton Photos courtesy of Gary Bloom
Gary Bloom’s search and rescue work with the San Mateo County Sheriff’s team has him traversing through forests, and like on the following page, poring over maps.
Since his student days at Cal Poly, retired CEO Gary Bloom has helped find the missing as a search and rescue volunteer
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fter a 30-inch natural gas pipeline exploded in San Bruno, California, sending huge flames into the air and leveling dozens of homes, search and rescue volunteers quickly assembled, with one primary goal: Find the missing. “You couldn’t find anything with a naked eye,” said Lisa Harris, a unit leader with the San Mateo County Sheriff’s search and rescue team. “We were using dogs.” As volunteers, firefighters, police and Red Cross workers descended on the scene in September 2010, Gary Bloom (Computer Science, ’82) was at the command post, coordinating the massive effort. Unlike most search and rescues Bloom has worked, the explosion represented a large-scale disaster. And, like the 2018 Camp Fire he worked, the goals were somber. “There were no expectations of finding anybody alive,” he said. “We were looking for bodies, unfortunately.” Bloom, a Cal Poly Honored Alumnus from 2000, is known for his work leading high-tech companies like VERITAS Software, eMeter and MarkLogic. But through the decades, he has also found missing people and saved lives as a member of search and rescue
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teams and as a volunteer emergency medical technician. “Gary never thinks of himself as higher or better than anyone else,” said Brian Spencer, an EMT who has volunteered with Bloom at Rock Medicine (RockMed), providing medical care to Bay Area concertgoers. “From simple emergencies to life and death, there is only a handful of people who I want with me. Gary Bloom is at the top of that list.” Bloom began volunteering on search and rescue missions the summer before his sophomore year at Cal Poly. He was working as a lifeguard in Pismo Beach when a local search and rescue team assisted Bloom and his partner with a complicated water rescue. During that rescue, a volunteer recruited him. “I ended up going down to the Pismo sand dunes that night and doing medical calls with them,” he said. After college, he had a brief stint with IBM in Colorado before moving back to California, where his rise in the corporate world culminated with multiple CEO positions. After focusing on his career for 15 years, he returned to volunteering in 2007, leading the San Mateo search and rescue