The Cost of Rescues

[barkernews]

American Alpine Club criticizes fee-for-rescue laws as misguided

 

DENVER (AP) - Three climbers already were dead on Oregon's Mount Hood in 2002 when a helicopter coming for survivors crashed and tumbled a thousand feet down a steep snowfield.

The accident seemed to symbolize the costs and risks of alpine search and rescue.

But a new study by the American Alpine Club says such dramatic and dangerous operations are the exception, and argues that state laws allowing climbers to be billed for their own rescues are misguided.

The report will be released Thursday and was provided to The Associated Press. It says American mountaineering deaths and injuries are declining, even though the number of climbers is increasing. Hikers, hunters, boaters and swimmers all require more rescues than climbers.

---

On the Net:

American Alpine Club: http://www.americanalpineclub.org

 

(Copyright 2005 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)

[Cobra_Commander]

Who needed a new study of that? Was there any question?

[chelle]

May not have been any question in the climbing community, but I don't think that was the primary audience of the study. Perhaps some of the misguided state and national legislators will read this and think twice about charging climbers for rescues.

 

How many hiker, boater, and hunter rescues receive as much coverage in the press as those sweeping shots of Hood or Rainier?

[Cobra_Commander]

perhaps they should consider this study in comparison: http://costofwar.com/

 

great website.

[sobo]

...How many hiker, boater, and hunter rescues receive as much coverage in the press as those sweeping shots of Hood or Rainier?

 

chelle's hit the nail on the head. I suspect the target audience is the armchair quarterback variety...

 

Every year we get scads of call-outs to go find lost hikers, snowmobilers, boaters, and bazillions of lost cold, hungry, ill-equipped hunters. Nobody covers these folks in the press unless they show up dead, which is rare.

[Cobra_Commander]

or they are cute and/or have rich parents, which is also rare

[Dru]

and then it's "Break out the Nitro!"

[rbw1966]

"But a new study by the American Alpine Club says . . ."

 

Thats not going to be biased at all.

[Stefan]

You don't hear that many rescues of recreational users by the Coast Guard becuase they happen often.

 

Does the Coast Guard charge for recreational user rescues?

[cj001f]

Does the Coast Guard charge for recreational user rescues?

No. It doesn't charge for professional users either.

[Dr_Crash]

One of the things most people do not think about is that if rescues stop being free, then the rescuers cost may not drop. They will dramatically increase their exposure to lawsuits, as people will expect rescue (today rescue is not a promise, it's a best effort); they will need to buy insurance for that; they will need to do clear accounting of what they did (since they bill), taking their focus away from the main goal of rescuing people during an operation. Everyone's costs will go up, and rescues may actually become worse. The question of how volunteer organizations interact with a paid-for team will also be interesting...

 

Keep them free. We pay taxes for that. And if you want to keep the worst idiots out of there, you can still sue them for reckless behavior and endangerement when this is clear (I believe that happened on Rainier once).

 

drC

[Ricardo_Montalban]

Every year we get scads of call-outs to go find lost hikers, snowmobilers, boaters, and bazillions of lost cold, hungry, ill-equipped hunters.

 

part of the problem is that the press calls everyone lost/hurt in the woods a climber

[sobo]

Yah, that one always gets to me.

[Dru]

unless they have a gun and an ATV

[chucK]

So if they force "climbers" to pay for their rescues, will they force everyone to pay (i.e. those that are not really climbers, but considered climbers because they are somebody who needed rescuing out in the wilderness)?

 

If not, all you would have to do after you were rescued is to just say you were fishing or glacier crabbing, or that you were lost.

[archenemy]

Yeah, fishing, that's it. I just have to combine my climbing harness with one of these so they don't know what I've been up to.

[Cobra_Commander]

well yer up to something with that harness on. I'd say yer up to no good.

[archenemy]

At least I'm up

[barjor]

Mm I have seen that type of harness on a totaly different type of web pages, with a shorter pole.

[Cobra_Commander]

Same facial expression I bet.

[chelle]

C'mon guys let's keep the spray in spray.

[sobo]

MOD IT, chelle! MOD IT!