Elitist all over the place There’re major problems with that way of thinking, some points outlined by other poster already,
…that if people know that they’re likely to be charged for a rescue, they’re less likely to do something that might require a rescue. <
As Scott B pointed out, fear of rescue cost may delay the call for rescue, leading to bigger risk to both the rescuer and rescuee.
That’s the whole point of charging for rescues; it’s a deterrent to stupid and irresponsible behavior. <
Greyak responded to that:
Those who’re ignorant of the safety issue are likely to be ignorant about the rescue charge.
It’s one thing for an otherwise prepared hiker/climber to need a rescue due to an accident and quite another when an unprepared idiot goes into the backcountry figuring his cell phone will get him and instant, free bailout. The latter deserves to pay for his/her stupidity.<
I quite disagree. Look at some of the disaster on Mt. Everest. Reading the accounts you got the impression that many climbers have no business being on that mountain. So they’re stupid and ignorant. Right? Yet, read a little more detail on the bio of those same climbers, many of them have summited quite a few (albeit lesser) peaks. So by ANY OTHER standard, those were accomplished/skill climbers. Where do you draw the line of who’s being “stupid and irresponsible”?
My point is: many so called “skilled” athlets (kayaker, climber, backpackers) also push the limit of their “wilderness experience”. They’re often the kind that ended up in trouble DEEP inside some hard-to-reach wilderness when they go beyong their own ability. That’s the kind of trouble that tend to risk the safety of the rescuer MORE than the cell-phone toting city sleaker who got lost 1/4 mile from the trail head!
I felt too many on this thread are too quick to jump to the conclusion that people who’re unaware of the danger are a safety hazard to rescuers. These same people fail to admit too many of “us” who are aware of the danger choose to push the limit just as often. When one of “us” do needs the rescue, it’s often the more risky kind.
My personal opinion is: “Routine” rescues in “easy to reach” locations should be free of charge, so to encourage people to “try a little” of the great outdoors. But if a person gotten good enough skill to be way out of reeach of the routine rescue zone, but managing to NOT learn the proper judgement to go with the skill. Well, if he/she got into DEEP trouble, they should be charged for the extra effort involved.
Now, how to do it in pratical terms is a different issue.
I believe now sends a bill after getting a call, picking up a patient and transporting to the hospital. This is true of a heart attack victim as well as the person who thinks that EMT is a free taxi cab ride to the hospital for check up on a cough in the emergency room.
The charge came after so many inappropriate (and abusive) use of the EMT service.
I believe in the social contract and our interconnectedness. I susport quality public services but I also believe in personal responsibility.
As someone involved in running community programs for over 20 odd years, I have found that programs that get most appreciated are the ones that the participant must pay for in a direct, concrete way (not abstract and indirect like "your tax dollars"). Yeah, we get public dollars to support some of the activities, and we do a lot of fundraising to make up for what public funding usually does not even come close to completely supporting to make these programs possible. We can probably do even more fundraising to make these programs free for some or all. But, I would rather not. The participants have to understand there is a cost and the best way to ingrained that is to make them pay a portion, no matter how minute compared to the real, overall cost. If it's a dollar for a youth or ten dollars for an adult, or whatever they can afford, pay they must to really appreciate that there is an inherent costs and value to whatever we do, use or take.
My perspective is not just something that I held from the start. Actually, the opposite as I used to think community services should be free. My current belief has evolved from really looking at and evaluating how folks respond to "fee for services" for quality programs and also how they see and treat the program when they pay or not.
Lets talk about paddlers. One day you decide to take up paddling. You go out and buy a canoe at the local sports store. Figure it’ll be good for fishing or just passing time. You go over to the local lake, never really thinking about the weather forecast. The morning is pretty nice. Its warm out. No wind. Harmless enough. You hop in your little boat and head off down the shoreline big smile on your face. A lifetime of paddling awaits.
Should you have signed up for class before hand? How would you attain the “skills” needed? I mean, you really dont need any skills to take up paddling. A little ambition will do. You get a boat and a paddle and go.
Lets say a thunderstorm rolled in and just before the skies got dark there came a trememndous wind that blows you over and sends out into the 3 mile wide lake. Someone sees you from shore and calls 911.
This would be the type of person you guys want to charge for a rescue? Sounds like it to me from reading this long line of rescue cost recovering posts… I mean, this paddler has no skills, no clue. No intention of causing himself harm. He is ignorant. He experienced some bad luck.
The only way to get around what some of you are saying is to have every paddler complete a paddler competency test before they buy a paddle. Beware what you are saying. All you “skilled paddlers” out there are talking yourselves into legislation for the rest of us. No thank you please. Right now we are free to kill ourselves and I thank God for that.
My guess is one in ten thousand paddlers might be causing a needless rescue. The most clueless paddlers I have ever come across are clueless from lack of experience. Heck they look prepared enough with all their new gear but you get experience from making mistakes. A long series of accidents if you will. Charge one paddler for a rescue and you might as well charge all of us. There is no difference between the fisherman in a canoe that gets blown over at the local lake or the group of seven skilled paddlers in the open ocean that experiences a medical emergency with one of its participants. Both incidents were accidents although I can see that many of the “skilled paddlers” here dont see it that way.
There are some of you that think you might not make a mistake any more that requires your rescue. I have never met someone like that.
my thinking is that if they just charge the rescuee, whatever apportioned cost that may be, that is preferable to folks/legislators saying, "Oh look what these idiots are costing us. Let's mandate certification before we let them on the water."
And, for the record, I would pay for my rescue if it came to down to a SAR team coming for me. As I already stated, I think there is rarely a "free lunch." And, no, I don't think I am immune from a rescue, having been pulled out and assisted by partners more than several times to be effectively dispelled such a notion. ;)
sing
PS. Just came to mind, several year ago, when I was just beginning to work my offside roll, I did the practice at a crowded lake next to a beach. Of course, I blew the first offside and went to my onside. Before I even had a chance to sweep... Whooosh! All of sudden, I was upright. Four teens had jumped into the water and literally flipped me over. I was embarassed to say the least. More so when I learned one of the teens have fried his cell phone coming to my "rescue." Tried as I might, he would not take reimbursement for the cell phone. (Which, btw, reaffirmed my belief that there are genuinely nice folks out there.) Now, I didn't pay the cost (nor really needed the rescue) but there was mostly definitely a cost involved -- that kid's cell phone. I wished he had taken the money (and was also truly proud of the kid for refusing it) because I know that I probably could have afforded more to pay for the phone replacement than he can. (The other lesson I learned is never practice near folks who don't understand what I am trying to do.)
Good climbers in theri twenties who check their forecasts and get caught on a big wall by a massive unexpected storm pay about 7000 each for rescues. Runs about 50 man hours
Joe tourist who goes out in the woods, without water or map but with his family gets lost for three days takes about 400 man days; pays nothing. Ther are brochures and signe everywhere talking about water.
This happened while i was in yosemite.
I think that should have been the other way around
Apportioned Most public services cost more than folks ever realize but that doesn’t mean that they can’t contribute a direct portion when they use the service over and above.
With SAR, I believe public dollars should support the existence of a team, it’s training and equipment. But, when it has mobilize with XX hours of overtime to come to someone’s rescue, it’s time for the rescuee to pony up over and above what every joe smo and jane doe pays to keep a team available and trained.
Heck, I broke my leg as a young teen skiing. My parents had no insurance. They paid $6,000 for my hospital bills. That was a lot of money in 1971. They made their payments for years until the bill was paid off. They probably could have filed bankruptcy or something like. But they did not. I thank them for lessons in responsibility.
Not speaking for anyone but me and not thinking what is right for anyone but me. I think this deal of personal responsibility is much harder to do than to talk about.
For me, I look back and was big on it for others but somehow found a number of rationalizations for justifying to my spouse and friends why I simply had to head off doing very risky things. I used a number of rationalizations, like I did not have the money to afford the safety equipment, it was some one else's fault when something happened rather than I should not have gone knowing they were a risk, etc.
For me, what is one of the harder things to admit is that when I want to do something really badly, I have a hard time accepting that it was my choice, and thus the risk and the consequence are mine also.
There are some folks, starting out new at something, like me. I can head out there and play on someone's sympathy and get out of paying for rescue by pleading ignorance, or I can read a book on kayaking and go, OK then, not as easy as thought, I will be more careful.
To my own credit, this past year I actually reigned in my impulsive and extreme ways and researched things so that I was safer in doing new things. The fruit of this is less pain more gain.
I guess I will refrain in thinking I know what is the way for others, it is hard enough getting my own act together. Still it does bother me that I am regularly seeing so many kayakers out there in freezing waters, mainly non-beginners, middle aged guys and older, zilch clothing, safety gear and ready to die, and the effect they have on the novices is to intimidate them into ignoring modest balanced ways of dealing with risk. I guess as my spouse says, hey, this is just the way it is, get used to it. Just becuase you were lucky and didn't kill yourself when you were doing it does not mean, like reformed smokers that you can say anything to anyone about it.
First off, the Everest disaster is in no way comparable to what we're talking about. It was a commmercial enterprise gone bad and it wasn't a case where they could phone for the local SAR squad to bail them out.
The problem is that people see rescues on TV all the time and simply assume that they can do the same thing. At an ice climbing event a few years back, a tale of two idiots who were rescued the day before was relayed to us. Two unprepared climbers found themselves stranded after dark, in a gale, at the top of Huntinton Ravine on Mt. Washington. The called 911 and asked to have a helicopter come pick them up. Since it was impossible to do so, they were told to hunker down and a rescue party would be sent in the morning. Of course, they were totally stunned that they weren't going to get a "hollywood" rescue. The next day, a group went up in a Snow Cat, then hiked over to find them. They were both alive, but expect to be carried out. The perturbed rescuers pointed to the Snow Cat and told them "There's your way down, start walking." I'd say that's the way it should be. BTW, everyone in the room aplauded.
What's needed is to educate the public to the fact that they are ultimately responsible for their own safety and they can't count on someone else risking their life to save them if they get into trouble. If you really want to save lives, that's the most effective way to do so. Take the fines collected from rescues and put it toward such an effort and you'll see a big improvement.
There's a big difference between elitism and common sense.
Imagine te process it’s called a court and in NH the opinion of the Head SAR person who did the job is pretty influential on the Judge. These folks are generous and have seem more folks in trouble that 90 % ot the readers here including me. They are well in a postition to know wheter a person is outrageously negligent of not.
Common sense? OK, apply yours to the logical outcomes of what you propose. Not what you want to see, but what would logically happen via legal channels (including counter suits) and the public opinion of NON-paddlers who would be more largely influencing the outcome. Really think it through. If you do, you common sense will get you off this kick real quick.
One side note to consider: Most of the people you would want to charge have NO WAY TO CALL FOR A RESCUE in the first place.
They most often DO NOT CALL FOR RESCUE. Someone else calls on their behalf because they are missing/overdue - or a good Samaritan spots them in trouble and calls it in. How can you charge them for a rescue they didn't ask for? How can you be sure they wouldn't have made it out on their own? Only a corpse proves that.
A simple example of how this can go wrong - (and a basis for easy defeat in court by even the dumbest hack lawyer): If I capsize off the beach - and some well intentioned individual calls 911 or *CG thinking I'm in serious trouble - and I simply self rescue and paddle on (while they ran to call, and now think I'm lost/drown/boat/blown away) - and the CG responds thinking there was a real situation - should I pay for their efforts?
This is really a longer version of Sing's "rescue"/cell phone story. In that case, what if instead of them rushing into the water to "help" right him and one dropping his cell phone into the water - he had instead used it to call for a rescue? Should Sing have paid for whatever assets showed up to "rescue" him?
It does not matter if you counter these examples with more "serious" situations. The legal principal, and several other ways out of such charges already mentioned, make it very hard, and very costly to all of us, to prosecute.
There is no end to the potential ridiculousness of this idea of charging - or the greater cost to everyone. Just take care of you and yours and let the professionals do the job they want to do, and we already pay them to do, for ALL of us.
That came when insurance covered it… and people payed for insurance vs. paying out of pocket. Check the dates when “HMO” became a common term and when ambulance rides we no longer free. All related. The charge for EMT and paid private ambulance services are there because of the way our insurance/medical system is set up - not because of abuses or anything like the jist of this thread.
Sing, I really like your views on this, but the World is as not as direct or mature as you. Others still feel need to control and be controlled. Not ready to go the total individual responsibility route. Not until we actually do kill all the lawyers and no one can profit off it.
"When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries dissapear and life stands explained."
Mark Twain
Greyak, dont' let it go to your head, but a compliment, you would have to bring up real flaws in the arguments given, darn you! OK you have some valid points here. By the way, I will admit I have heard that the total cost of rescues is not as high as some would think, and the cost is sometimes underwritten as training by the milatary and others, as they have to go out every so often. However, I reserve the right to still say there is someting to what I am saying, as it is for me, mostly a way of thinking that keeps me to the straight and narrow.
How about some specifics? Exactly what do you expect to happen? The worst that’s likely to occur is that it would be difficult to collect the fines unless the offenders were somehow compelled to pay them (refusal of driver’s license renewal or something similar). There might be a few legal skirmishes, but really, what leverage would the offenders have? They put themselves in jeopardy, then asked to be rescued. Legally, they would have little or no leg to stand on.
What’s the alternative? We could simply not do backcountry SAR (which would clean up the gene pool somewhat), but that hardly seems like the best solution. We could raise taxes to pay for it, but that’s not fair at all. We could charge (or increase) backcountry usage fees, but that always creates a huge uproar, though it’s arguably the fairest way to deal with backcountry SAR costs.
Until someone comes up with a better alternative, I’ll stick with the idea of public education and charging for rescues where it seems warranted. That’s the system we have here in NH and I don’t hear any complaints or see bodies piling up from people choosing not to be rescued due to the potential cost.
Believe what you want, but the truth is that when someone’s life is hanging in the balance, they WILL make the call, regardless of the cost. If they know that there’s not a free, easy ride waiting at the other end of the phone, they’ll be more inclined to think about what they’re doing.
