Chesterfield County recently named Thomas “Tommy” Tucker as its new director of emergency communications.
Tucker served as interim co-director of the Emergency Communications Center since October 2018.
He began in his new role as director of emergency communications May 4 at a salary of $125,000.
With 32 years working in public safety, Tucker has a unique and thorough understanding of the importance of emergency communications and the essential role of the ECC staff as the public’s first contact in the event of an emergency, a press release states.
As director, he will oversee the daily operations of the ECC, which receives an average of 514 calls for service each day, while managing its programs and setting goals to achieve the department’s mission of assisting its public safety partners and the public when an incident occurs. Tucker will also work closely with ECC partners to implement new technology, such as the Motorola Premier 1 Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) system.
“The Emergency Communications Center is a vital component to our county’s public safety infrastructure and the ECC director is both a pivotal point of contact and an essential leadership partner in the fulfillment of our unified public safety mission,” police chief Col. Jeffrey Katz said.
Prior to coming to Chesterfield, Tucker worked with Colonial Heights Volunteer Fire & EMS and the Virginia National Guard Fire & Rescue.
He joined Chesterfield Fire & EMS in 1995 as recruit and steadily rose in rank to battalion chief.
In addition to being a certified firefighter and emergency medical technician, Tucker has served as a fire training instructor and is trained in the Incident Command System, which is a standardized organizational system for the effective and efficient coordination of emergency response.
