Comment by grecy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by grecy | Hacker News Reader

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> Your "personal choice" may end up risking the lives of search and rescue personnel,

This is the standard answer everyone gives, and it makes no logical sense. I worked search and rescue, and have plenty of friends that have it as their full-time occupation.

Search and rescue personal are trained professionals, who willingly signed up for that career, and who love being in the back-country. They know full and well what they're getting into, and going out and rescuing people is the definition of their chosen career. If there was nobody to rescue, they wouldn't be able to support themselves doing what they love.

In fact when there are no rescues for a while they go out in their helicopters and practice all the "dangerous" stuff putting their "lives in danger". So even if there was nobody to rescue, they'd still be out there.

Following on from your logic, it only makes sense we should ban open fireplaces and cigarettes in houses because that's the leading cause of house fires, which then put fireman's lives in danger.

> and costing the public hundreds of thousands of dollars

Please don't exaggerate, it detracts from the discussion.

The average heli rescue costs around $10k (heli's are smack on $1k/hr), and in many jurisdictions if the person getting rescued was doing something stupid, they foot the bill, not the public.

> Following on from your logic, it only makes sense we should ban open fireplaces and cigarettes in houses because that's the leading cause of house fires,

That's an amusing example to me, because indoor and outdoor fireplaces of any kind are in fact banned in my city, since it's densely built with lots of wood buildings, and because of air quality concerns, my city has deemed they are not worth the risk.

> which then put fireman's lives in danger.

And yes, the firemen will be the first to give you an earful if you don't respect the fire safety code.

> following from your logic [...], we should ban [...] cigarettes

Nice strawman though. I said it was in society's interest to set limits, I made no argument as to what exactly the limits should be. That's not my decision or yours, as long as it's public resources that are at stake, it should be a democratic process.

> The average heli rescue costs around $10k (heli's are smack on $1k/hr), and in many jurisdictions if the person getting rescued was doing something stupid, they foot the bill, not the public.

In that case, as I said, if they are footing the bill, I really have no problem with it.

Here in Vancouver, we're really close (15 minute drive for a lot of people) to dangerous mountainous terrain that is really popular with inexperienced hikers and so generate a high volume of search and rescue calls.

The S&R folks are really adamant that they do not want to charge end-users for rescues, because that means that people will wait longer before calling them, resulting in more deaths and even higher overall costs because the rescues become more complicated.

Also worth pointing out that as frequent as things like avalanches and outdoor rescues may seem — the higher risk is often driving the highway to the trailhead. It's a risk that we've come to accept as a society. We don't even think about it anymore.

Many who spend their lives in the mountains say that with proper training they'd rather do the risky activity (where there are many known ways in which risk can be mitigated) than die in some random / tragic car accident (where you can do everything right but still die).

BTW, fellow Canadian (Calgary) here, "hey" from the other side of the Rockies :-)

That's a decent point, and I expect they know better than me since I'm no S&R specialist.

> and in many jurisdictions if the person getting rescued was doing something stupid, they foot the bill, not the public.

“Are liable to the public to reimburse” rather than “foot”; the distinction is critical because the rescued individual may not have the resources to actually pay or may be impossible to collect from. The more expensive the rescue is, naturally, the more likely this is to be the case.

FWIW search and rescue in most of the US (and, I think, Canada) is volunteer-based and funded mostly by donations from the community. Some areas have laws that allow for them to recover rescue costs from people found to be in some way negligent. Even the most notorious of these areas (New Hampshire) doesn't tend to charge exorbitant amounts of money.

This is overall a really good system and the volunteers love doing it and are happy to do it. It struggles a little bit in areas with communities that can't afford to donate much to a SAR team.

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