America’s EMT Shortage Has Communities Relying on Unpaid Volunteers

There’s a crisis unfolding in rural America. While big cities are getting bigger, small-town USA is shrinking. If you live in one of these rural communities, chances are you’re poorer and sicker than your urban counterpart. Across the country, towns that have less people have even less first responders. Oceana, West Virginia is one of those towns. It’s surrounded by logging jobs and coal mines that provide a main source of income for the roughly 1,300 people that live there. (VICE News, 5 Mar 2020)