Just a quick thought on charging for rescues: I seem to remember this issue coming up in the climbing/mountaineering community due to the large increase in participants in the 70's. The SAR and Parks organizations were trying to grapple with the increased demand for rescues. I think for everyone involved that there was no desire to charge people for "legitimate" rescues, i.e. for circumstances beyond the control of the victims or where reasonable judgement could not have prevented. The rescue people were just getting tired of pulling people off the mountain that simply got in over their heads or were ill equipped for the conditions. This wasted resources and also put rescue personnel and volunteers at unnecessary risk. One of the ideas proposed was to charge the people who got into trouble because of their own lack of preparedness or inexperience. This in theory would give a financial incentive to get proper instruction and be properly equipped for the conditions. And on the surface this seems a reasonable thing to do--make the irresponsible individuals pay for their own rescues. however I think the practical reality of allowing a government agency or decided what was reasonably unforeseeable and what was not (especially to the general public) could make them face even more costly litigation. I have never heard of anyone ever having to pay under these rules except in cases of out right criminal negligence and reckless endangerment. I know in some places where they had control over the activities they would issue a permit. This happened to me in 1980 when a few climbing buddies and I went to climb mount Rainier. A specially trained climbing ranger would inspect our equipment, interview each of us to determine our experience and intended route, and then issued us a climbing permit. It was a very reasonable interview and I actually felt good about it to know there was at least some kind of a process to reduce the risk of being exposed to someone else's stupidity (I have put myself at risk more than a few times pulling someone else's butt off a mountain they should have not been on). Unfortunately there are not very many places where such policing is possible in wilderness situations and I do not know if more rigorously enforcing regulations with citations and fines would help much. I think this would simply result in more complaints than actual compliance. Peter *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List - All postings copyright the author and not to be reproduced/forwarded outside PaddleWise without author's permission Submissions: PaddleWise_at_PaddleWise.net Subscriptions: PaddleWise-request_at_PaddleWise.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************Received on Mon Oct 02 2000 - 19:54:22 PDT
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.4.0 : Thu Aug 21 2025 - 16:30:32 PDT