This Alabama county is now down to just one ambulance: ‘It’s cost lives’

In the three weeks since Pickens County dropped down to one ambulance, two women died after waiting an hour for paramedics to arrive.

One woman went into cardiac arrest and died before an ambulance could arrive in Aliceville, her small town in rural west Alabama. Volunteer first responders performed CPR for an hour as they waited for an ambulance to make the 50-mile drive from Tuscaloosa. It was a bad weather day so the helicopter couldn’t make it in time either.

Another woman, just 37, went into heart failure at the federal prison in Aliceville. The county’s only ambulance was transporting another patient so it took about an hour to get to her. She died shortly after arriving at the hospital.

“We’ll never know if she would’ve lived if we made it on time,” said Vicky Sullivan McCrory, the paramedic manager at Pickens County Ambulance Service. “But I think she would have. I think her situation could’ve been corrected.”

Pickens County moved to only one ambulance on Oct. 25. The reduction in ambulance service is just the latest in a downward spiral, as rural communities across Alabama watch emergency rooms and hospitals shutter, and as pediatricians, dentists and maternity care have disappeared in over a third of the state’s counties.