John Stossel: Why Should We Rescue the Reckless?

May 8, 2009— -- Almost every day, somewhere in America, rescuers take heroic risks to help someone.

They arrive in helicopters to pull hikers off Grand Canyon ledges and lift surfers out of the Pacific Ocean. They rescue mountaineers stranded on snowcapped mountains, and help rafters out of rivers. They also rescue people who are trying to kill themselves.

Sometimes rescuers put their own lives on the line. In 2002, when climbers on Oregon's Mt. Hood fell into a crevasse, a military helicopter flew to the rescue. That chopper crashed, and the pilot was seriously hurt. It became a rescue of a rescuer.

But all too often, the rescued are adventurers who are in trouble because they took foolish risks. Examples are easy to find on the Internet. YouTube is crammed with videos of risky behavior, like people jumping into Arizona's Lake Powell from its 100-foot cliffs.

But even mundane sports like fishing can be treacherous if people are careless. Every winter people walk or drive onto the ice of Lake Erie to fish. One day in February fishermen drove over a crack in the ice that threatened to open up in the windy weather.

One of the fishermen, Joe Garverick, explained that the crack was the reason he used an airboat: "So you can go home at night and see your kids." But most of the fishermen didn't use airboats -- many went out on four wheelers or on foot, and some knew the risk.

One fisherman said, "This morning the ice looked bad. Going out, a lot of people said we shouldn't go out. Wind, everything looked bad, we decided to go out anyhow."

Jenny Olson was on the ice with the TV crew for the show "Michigan Out-of-Doors." She was concerned about the people who had driven onto the ice, saying, "in a wind like this, that's not the smart thing to do. That crack's going to get bigger and bigger as the day goes on." And it did.

Just a few hours later the crack was 20 feet of open water. The fishermen without airboats were going to have trouble getting back to shore. Someone called 911 and said, "There's about a 50-foot gap between the crack and the shoreline. There's probably 500 guys out there still."