The Past, Present, and Future of South Carolina Task Force 1: Part 1

December 16, 2024

Hurricane Hugo and setting the stage for a statewide response team

The Past, Present, and Future of South Carolina Task Force 1
Part 1: Hurricane Hugo and setting the stage for a statewide response team

The South Carolina fire service looked a lot different in 1989 than it does now. South Carolina Task Force 1 was over a decade away from being formed, but the seeds of a statewide response team were planted in the fall of ‘89. Even though the team’s first deployment was 16 years away, the history of SC-TF1 begins with Hurricane Hugo.

Urban search and rescue (US&R) training had been occurring in South Carolina prior to 1989, but it was the formal team that was missing. Burton Fire District Chief Tom Webb was part of the team requested to build Task Force 1.

“We’d been teaching structural collapse programs, so there was a good cadre of emergency responders out there that knew what it was, had been trained in it, they just needed a home,” Webb says.

While members were trained and prepared, the South Carolina fire service lacked the ability to combine resources to respond to disasters. There was no communications or logistics infrastructure to allow for a statewide response.

And then around midnight on September 22, 1989, everything changed.

Mick Mayers, one of the individuals assigned to form Task Force 1, recalls the conversations about a statewide response system in the years that followed Hugo.

“After Hugo hit, there was discussion in the state about developing a heavy rescue aspect, or urban search and rescue aspect,” Mayers remembers. “There was discussion with the National Guard, Firefighters’ Association, and a couple other entities about putting together some sort of state response asset.” But the timing wasn’t quite right. Pieces were still missing.

Don Headrick was part of the original planning group and remembers how the lack of a formalized response team was partially due to the inability to pool resources from across the state.

“In 1989, we had Hurricane Hugo, and we really had in the state no formalized rescue team, or like we have now, Firefighter Mobilization,” Headrick continues, “We really didn’t have the resources to pull together people across the state to respond to those kinds of events.”

The seeds of a statewide response team were planted in the 80s, watered in the 90s, and in the fall of 2001, sprouts began to show.