If you call for an ambulance in one part of Letcher County, you could be waiting a little longer than usual.

Cumberland River Volunteer Fire Department officials say they've stopped their ambulance service due to rising costs.

Saving lives and helping the community is just another day on the job for fire and rescue departments.

"We've saved a lot of the local lives, we've also have the mines up here and we respond to their accidents and things," said Teresa Osborne, EMS Director of Cumberland River.

Cumberland River Volunteer Fire Department made the decision to shut down ambulance service because they don't have enough money to pay the bills.

"It was a killer decision because we put everything into doing this. We bought the ambulance and everything with the money we raised at bingo," Osborne said.

10 years ago, Cumberland River added an ambulance to their services costing them over $100,000 a year. They raise 80 percent of the money though weekly games of bingo, but raising the money needed is getting harder each week.

"It's just costing so much to operate that eventually it would take the fire service down with it," said James Lewis, Chief of the Cumberland River Fire Department.

"We don't have a lot of runs because we don't have that big of coverage area, but the runs that we do get are usually very serious because we're far away from everybody else," Osborne said.

The ambulance made around 200 runs a year. Now Neon Volunteer Fire Department will cover the area.

"Well the thing that worries us about the runs itself, is the response time cause we got to go across Pine Mountain and that's going to take us a while to do that," said Carter Bevins, Chief of the Neon Volunteer Fire Department.

Chief Lewis says it's the pay roll for EMS workers that they can't afford anymore, but having new and trained volunteers would help change the situation around.

Chief Lewis says the fire department will not be affected in the change and they have not made any plans to rid of the ambulance yet.