@yknpdlr " but many could have been prevented or self-rescued with a little more preparedness and careful thought on the part of the careless subject before automatically relying on their determined “right” to be rescued with the press of a button."
THAT is the key issue in question, Preparedness and careful thought. New Hampshire isn’t looking to bill EVERYONE needing a rescue, but only those that are grossly unprepared and unequipped.
Someone hiking falls and gets seriously injured, no worries, it happens. A kid or person with dementia wanders off and gets lost, again, not a problem.
Someone sets out two hours before sunset to hike Mt. Monadnock and didn’t think to bring water and a flashlight and falls off a 20 foot ledge while wandering in the dark, or a couple of runners think they’ll take on Mt. Lafayette in January in sneakers… they deserve the bill for their stupidity. They should have at least bought the Hike Safe card.
All of the support for volunteer services is dependent on one fairly important point - having enough volunteers. Volunteer firefighter companies in the US are having a much harder time recruiting, something that the urge to provide service alone often handled.
Having volunteers available to do rescues means that the ones who are ready to do it cannot find that it becomes a burnout job that over time reduces their incentive. At a rate of a rescue a week, people are likely not going to find it means they lose crucial time with families, their jobs etc.
But the above numbers from NH and NY show a pattern of a rescue every two days, or less than one day. That produces a much higher strain on the pool of potential volunteers. This is probably not sustainable. If the prospect of a cost for being unprepared alters peoples’ behaviors, long term this might be needed.
And outfits like highway patrol or local police forces have people on the payroll to help with that. The only volunteers involved would be possibly local EMT’s with fire departments. But some are paid too.
I only remembered after I replied, but I think I read about one of the incidents that NHTrucker refers to above. “a couple of runners think they’ll take on Mt. Lafayette in January in sneakers” It was a pretty good example of the behavior that makes people crazy.
Some years ago the Coast Guard told a solo cruising sailor, whom they rescued on the ocean from well predicted storms three times in one year, that if he went out again with a storm approaching they would NOT come save him.
If he, or his boat, could not handle unexpected conditions he should not be out there anyway much less expect someone to come get him.
To be clear, it is the Forest Ranger and Law Enforcement professionals who are getting on average nearly one rescue per day, Since the average time to be rescued is down to a very short time, less than a few hours, mostly due to cell phone geolocation (obviously a good thing) highly trained voluteers are rarely neeeded or are called. The weekend rate is of course much higher.Many of those calls are for the ubiquitous " non weight bearing lower leg injury", serious enough for a large handful of forest rangers to drop other normal assigned woodlandand patrol activites and to come assist with the victim carry-out. My team only received five calls in 2021, and two of those that went into the second operational period (the next morning) were resolved quickly before anyone was really needed on scene. My bag was packed and I was headed out the door when the stand down call came in. The other incidents involved dozens of team members, plus hundreds of local civilian untrained volunteers to be minimally trained on the spot. I have even had to train state police troopers who had no clue of what to do on a search or recovery.
The only strain on the pool of potential volunteers is lack of need. It is becoming extremely difficult to hold a viable team going when there is little perceived purpose in doing so. You can only do so many repetitive “mock search” training activities before everyone feels they have done that too many times to be useful.
Over the years of SAR volunteeering (30 of them for me) and working with state DEC and L.E. officials, I have always felt and observed that nothing holds a trained SAR team together, or gains new member interest in joining more than a few large 'campaign" incidents when everyione feels their volunteering of effort, training, and fund raising is worthwhile.
Branching out and expanding a SAR team’s scope to trail maintenance and becoming trailhead educators or trail stewards has been tried with little success.
I just reread this. So my take away is that most of the rescues are being done by paid folks that are reimbursed out of tax dollars and one option to make it cost less is to rely on volunteers more. Especially when these paid resources get trained by volunteers to do it right, like state police troopers.
Seems to me there is elbow room in there to use the volunteers more and pull some of these costs off the public dime…
What he wrote is apt in NYS where he lives. Not applicable to all areas.
One problem is of course keeping all skills up to date. Similar to my old EMS field , many hours of training are needed annually whether or not you use these skills.
Not sure why he calls it a kayak. Merriam-Webster defines a kayak as a light narrow boat that has both ends tapered to a point, is propelled by a double-bladed paddle, and often has a closed top except for an opening in which the paddler sits with the legs extended straight out in front.
So call it a SOT with an unusually large cargo area… these cross Atlantic designs are all quite odd ducks and really are not properly categorized as anything.
For doing what he does, he can call it anything he likes on his adventure. Calling it a “spaceship” would be descriptive and not be too far out of line.
Uh oh… the article refers to attempt number two as a “descent”. Is that an omen or what?
And he is going to wake up every two hours; solo sailors shoot for 20 minutes, mostly to make sure they aren’t going to be run down by freighters, and many can rely on radar and radar reflectors.
Saw another article that mentioned the person was a mile out from the summit on the Gulfside trail. Means that he was above treeline and exposed. With 80 mph wind, snow and rain, it’s pretty hard to hunker down anywhere out of the wind and elements.