Zeroth Responder
The Widening Gap Between Calling for Help and Help Arriving
America’s emergency response system — the network of fire departments, ambulance services, and law enforcement agencies that answers when you dial 911 — was built for a country that no longer exists. Three independent forces are converging to widen the gap between calling for help and help arriving. This is a book about those forces, the people caught in that gap, and what comes next.
Zeroth Responder is a forthcoming book from John Geoghegan and Stephen Hudak.
Latest
September 1, 2026
EMS faces the aging of America from both sides at once: the population that calls for ambulances most is growing fast, while the population that staffs them is not.
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Recent Writing
July 1, 2026
Three structural forces — demographic transformation, fiscal constraint, and institutional decline — are quietly lengthening the distance between an emergency and the response to it.