Georgetown County’s longest-serving dispatcher, Susie Tuck, has been answering the call since before most people knew how to make one

In honor of National Public Safety Telecommunicators Week, Georgetown County is profiling Susie Tuck, a veteran dispatcher celebrating 38 years of professional service who began her career at just 11 years old answering emergency calls in her parents’ bedroom.

When Susie Tuck started answering emergency calls in the mid-1970s, 911 was still years away from being introduced in South Carolina. Tuck herself was still years away from being on the county payroll – or even starting high school. She was about 11 years old, she guesses.

Now the county’s 911 Operations Manager and longest-serving telecommunicator, Tuck grew up as part of the Midway Fire/Rescue family in Pawleys Island. Of course, back then the rescue part hadn’t been added on. The department was all volunteer and housed in a small wooden building with two bays on Highway 17 next to Gullie’s convenience store, just north of Martin Luther King Blvd. Neither of those structures stands today.

Tuck’s mother, Margaret was a Lieutenant with Midway. Her father John Roy and brother John Roy Jr. were also volunteer firefighters. Each emergency response department had its own line at the time, and the one for Midway rang through to a phone that hung on the wall in Margaret and John Roy Tuck’s bedroom. You couldn’t dial out. It was strictly for incoming calls.

When the phone rang and Margaret and John Roy Sr. had to rush to a call, it fell to Susie to notify the rest of the department.

“She’d wake me up with the address,” Tuck recalled, “and I’d call the other five volunteers they had and tell them where to go.”

For thousands of people, she has been the calm voice on the other end of the line during the most frightening moments of their lives.

This week, as Georgetown County joins communities across the nation in recognizing National Public Safety Telecommunicators Week, Tuck reflects on a career that spans nearly four decades as a professional dispatcher. She has worked through pencil-and-paper logs, foot-pedal microphones and single-agency dispatch to become second-in-command at one of the region’s most technologically advanced emergency communications centers. She has seen it all because she was there for it all.

“May 11th will be my 38th year of dispatching,” Tuck said simply, as if that number doesn’t represent generations worth of emergencies large and small and countless lives touched.

From Four Digits to 911
The national 911 emergency system was rolled out in 1968, but it was decades before it was in place in all areas of the country. Charleston was an early adopter of the system in South Carolina in 1981, with the state’s first official 911 Communications Center opening in Columbia in 1985. 911 came to Georgetown County on October 28, 1996.

Before that, callers had to know the last five digits of the phone number for the specific station they wanted to call for help. For Midway Fire, it was 7-4444. County Fire was 7-3020. Each department handled its own calls, often from a single dispatcher working alone. Tuck can still rattle off all the old numbers.

When Tuck came on professionally as a high school senior — drawn initially by the health insurance, she’ll admit — she worked out of the original Midway Headquarters next to the old Gullie’s. There was one dispatcher at a time. There was a boom microphone and a foot pedal. On a busy day, the phone might ring six times.

“We’d probably be lucky if we got six calls,” she said. “Big, big change.”

She filled the quiet hours with cross-stitch, she recalled with a laugh. There’s certainly not a spare moment for that these days.

38 Years, Five Buildings, One Mission
As the county’s emergency communications infrastructure grew, Tuck advanced with it. From the tiny Midway station to Midway’s current headquarters location in Litchfield, then to 120 Broad St. in Georgetown — where the center finally consolidated all county agencies under one roof and earned the name Central — she followed the work. Central is now housed with the Emergency Operations Center on Highmarket Street. When she eventually retires, she will finish her career at the county’s new 911 facility currently in design and soon to be under construction on Highway 51. She will have worked in five different locations over more than four decades. 

Today the center handles 200 to 400 calls a day — not all emergencies, she’s quick to note. People call about loose dogs. Frogs on the porch. Warrants. The full range of human concern, urgent and otherwise, funnels through her center.

But the technology meeting those calls looks nothing like the boom microphone of her early days. RapidSOS, a location-sharing system that activates automatically when someone dials 911, can pinpoint a caller’s position from a cell tower and zoom in to their precise location within three to five seconds. Text-to-911 is now available, already used in real emergencies — and yes, occasionally by people just testing whether it works.

“We’ve had the fake ones where they say ‘I’ve been kidnapped’ and you chase them down and they’re like, ‘Oh, I was making sure it worked,’” she said, with the patience of someone who has seen every flavor of human behavior over many years.

Still Answering the Call
Emergency communications work takes something from a person. Tuck doesn’t pretend otherwise.

Dispatchers are first responders — the first voice a person in crisis hears — but they rarely learn how the story ends.

“The worst thing about it is not always finding out the outcome,” she said.

She has heard things that have stayed with her. She doesn’t elaborate, and she doesn’t need to. Nearly four decades of other people’s worst moments leave marks.

And yet she stays. She is 62 now and has been thinking about 65 as a possible finish line, though she isn’t committed to it. The job, she said, is simply part of who she is — woven into her identity the way dispatching was woven into her family long before she was old enough to work a shift.

Would she miss it? “Oh, God, yeah. Yes,” she said.

When asked what has kept her at it all these years, her answer is immediate and uncomplicated.

“Helping people,” she said. “Just to get to help people.”