So I was watching CNN the other day and they were running a story about some folks in Spartanburg, South Carolina who experienced a small kitchen fire, and decided to fight it themselves because of a previous CNN story reporting on a neighboring jurisdiction in Cherokee County which had passed a law that would allow the local fire department to bill the insurer of victims to recoup the costs of fighting the fire. The law, as I am given to understand it, is not particularly onerous and doesn’t affect uninsured victims in the least (which, at least in Washington, would seem to make it unconstitutional), but the news being the news and people being people, that apparently wasn’t communicated effectively. Nor was the fact that the law didn’t affect the town in which these folks lived. The message that got through was “If the fire department shows up, you’re getting a bill.”
Of course they then had the local fire chief on, explaining that had some neighbors not called when they saw the incident developing, the whole house might have burnt to the ground due to extension through the attic, and the gentleman inside with the garden hose would likely have died in that event.
I bring all this up on a sailing blog for a couple of reasons. The story about American sailor Keith Carver, ship-wrecked in BC this past month, has illustrated how the foolhardy or inexperienced sometimes get themselves into places where they require rescue through bad decisions. This isn’t news; if you trace the web of events leading to any rescue scenario, you’ll likely find a trail of bad decisions along the way, and it is really only in the degree of badness that any distinction can be made between experienced and inexperienced sailors.
But the fact that some obviously bad decisions are sometimes involved has lead to a movement of sorts leading to laws of the sort that Cherokee County passed (and since repealed) seeking to compensate rescuers for coming out and saving the damn fools that made those decisions. This is more common in wilderness than urban rescue, but with many jurisdictions both urban and rural scratching for funds with their tax bases hard hit by the recession, it’s an attractive trend. New Hampshire’s Fish and Game Department has billed survivors of rescue attempts regularly for the past three years, while eight other states have laws on the books allowing such billing but only do so sporadically.
What has surprised me is the degree to which many sailors support this concept and even advocate its adoption by the Coast Guard. A case involving a German crew rescued two years ago from a dis-masted vessel in the Gulf Stream off the Atlantic Coast resulted in a firestorm of debate on some sailing boards over the rescue of people who put themselves in harm’s way or mis-judged the severity of their situations in calling for aid.
This surprises me for a number of reasons. First, that the concept has a chilling effect has been long posited by serious rescue organizations, who are generally forthright and clear in telling people that they should call freely and early if they are in any doubt as to their situation. People who do search and rescue for a living don’t expect victims to be thinking clearly; they would rather you allow them to make the decision whether or not rescue is necessary. Introducing pay-as-you-go rescue will result in more deaths, and paradoxically, more danger for rescuers, who won’t get calls early enough to effect easy rescues, but instead will hear from victims only when the situation finally becomes desperate. This is not a unanimous view, of course, but my own observation has been that people who are full-time professionals are more likely to hold it than, say, a game warden who gets roped into the role.
Second, it betrays a tremendously simplistic view of how bad things happen at sea. I was surprised more sailors weren’t aware of the so-called decision funnels that generally lead to a disaster. It’s human, perhaps, to latch on to information that seems obvious from an armchair after the fact and say “I would have done this differently!” but most disasters result from a slow accumulation of minor decisions, few of which seem serious or controversial in isolation, but each of which restricts subsequent options, eventually funneling the victim toward danger. Some environmental impairment of cognitive function is also a common factor; you can see things there in your comfy armchair which might not be so obvious on a pitching, slippery deck in the dead of night.
The flip side of this is that, should the chain of events be interrupted early in the process, it can appear that the call for help was frivolous or needless. If you call for a tow with a dead engine in calm conditions it can look a little histrionic; should the wind pick up, a freighter bear down on you, or the tide shift you toward a rocky shore, you can bet that whoever comes out to get you will be wishing you had called when it was still calm and easy to resolve the situation. Discouraging people from making those calls is simply going to make things more dangerous and more expensive in the long run.
Third, we (sailors) already have pretty robust and time-tested traditions for dealing with these situations. When lives are in danger, anyone capable, consistent with the safety of their own crew and vessel, is obliged by law and custom to render assistance. To deal with the possibility of frivolous calls for assistance, salvage law provides for the compensation of the rescuer in situations where the rescued vessel is not, in fact, lost. The intricacies of Admiralty Law on these points is far beyond me, but the principles are clear and historic: aid is rendered when asked for without expectation of compensation. Compensation may, however, arise from property recovered in the course of rendering that aid… an implicit hedge against those who might cry wolf.
Of course, it is still frustrating for tax-payers to see their money going toward saving people in foreseeably avoidable situations. Last week, a kite-surfer near Tacoma had to be rescued by firefighters when the wind died, stranding him far from shore. The wind being what it is, one has to wonder why this possibility, and making contingencies for it, didn’t enter the surfer’s mind ahead of time.
Even more frustrating are those situations in which the contingency plan seems to be calling emergency services. The advent of reliable modern communication equipment has lead some adventurers to skimp on safety gear and training and rely on a cellphone and rescue service helicopters in case the going gets tough. Local author Jon Krakauer in his book “Eiger Dreams” describes just how seductive this can be when he describes a rough day ice-climbing in France. There, rescue bills seem more common, but so does insurance covering them… making it less “rescue” than “retrieval,” more on par with our Vessel Assist subscriptions than with emergency services.
Personally I am a fan of the existing maritime rescue system, flaws and all. I don’t think the Coast Guard or other emergency services should be in the business of sending out bills; I think it creates negative incentives all the way around, both within those agencies and among those who might need their help. The price of bailing out the occasional idiot (a group among which I unreservedly include myself; perhaps that’s a bias!) is something that we should collectively agree to bear, because any of us may be the idiot (or be worried about being seen as the idiot) next time. The thing about emergencies is that, by definition, you don’t see them coming, even if someone else does. I suppose there is some perfect person out there that is better than all the rest of us and would never get caught unaware; for everyone else, it seems to me we should chip in without enmity until our time comes.