“They're just showing up and dying.”

Those words made emergency responders' ears perk up in Huntington, W.Va., when they buzzed over the radio. An official was quoting a caller who needed help at a local home.

“I just caught a bit of that,” another official replied. “What are people showing up and doing?”

“All they can tell us is that ‘people are showing up and dying,'?” the first official said. “We're not sure what's going on.”

It was Monday afternoon, and an unusual mass crisis was beginning in Huntington, a city of nearly 50,000 on the western edge of West Virginia — a crisis increasingly familiar to paramedics, firefighters and police officers across the United States.

When police arrived at the house, they found seven people — four inside, three in the yard — who had just overdosed on what appeared to be an especially nasty batch of heroin.

Yet that was only the beginning. The calls didn't stop. All afternoon, ambulances, police officers and firefighters began crisscrossing the city, responding to reports of more than two dozen men and women overdosing — in homes, in a gas station bathroom, at a Family Dollar store, in a Burger King parking lot, slumped behind the wheel in traffic on the West 17th Street Bridge.

Overdoses are not something new to Huntington, a college town that often sees drugs flow in from Detroit and Columbus, Ohio. Gripped first by pill mills and now by a heroin epidemic, West Virginia has the nation's deadliest overdose rate by far, with 35 of every 100,000 residents dying each year. Huntington's overdose rate is more than three times higher.

“It's not uncommon to find them slumped over at a red light, car in gear,” Huntington Police Chief Joe Ciccarelli said.

Cabell County normally sees about 18 to 20 overdose calls a week, according to Gordon Merry, director of Cabell County EMS, whose offices are in Huntington.

In just five hours on Monday, officials responded to calls for 26 overdose victims, almost all of them in Huntington, according to city spokesman Brian Chambers. Investigators think a potent batch of drugs likely had appeared in Huntington and had been distributed widely and quickly, leading to a crush of overdose cases.

As the opioid addiction crisis has grown across the U.S. in recent years, illicit batches of unusually powerful opiates can bring overdose outbreaks with dozens of victims, such as when at least 11 people died in Northern California last spring.

In some of those cases, the drugs are laced with a powerful and potentially lethal additive such as fentanyl that can cause addicts to stop breathing and their hearts to stop beating.

On Monday night, officials responded to what they didn't initially realize was their 27th call, a Huntington man who died after being taken to the hospital. A relative reported that the man had been suffering a seizure, and did not mention that he was an addict, Ciccarelli said.

The next day, officials found another body outside city limits, a man who had been in recovery from addiction and who had likely overdosed Monday, Ciccarelli said.

But given the scale of the crisis that had unfolded, those were the only two deaths. For that, Huntington likely has naloxone to thank.

Last year, Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin signed a bill into law expanding access to naloxone, a highly effective opioid overdose antidote, to first responders and the public. Now, every Cabell County ambulance crew carries naloxone, and since earlier this year, so do the local police and fire crews.

One Huntington officer used naloxone on a man and a woman when he arrived at the house with seven overdose victims. Officials said EMS responders gave naloxone to about 10 other victims.

Expanded naloxone access came after opioid overdoses had surged in recent years, killing 58 residents in 2015, according to Dr. Michael Kilkenny, physician director of Cabell-Huntington Health Department.

matt.pearce@latimes.com