Pay for Your Own Rescue
Taking stupid risks is not the taxpayer's responsibility!
June 3, 2009 — -- I have something to say to all those people who take dumb risks and then expect the rest of us to pick up the tab: Pay for your own stupid mistakes.
Almost every day rescuers save someone somewhere in America.
Sometimes rescuers put their own lives on the line. When climbers on Mt. Hood fell into a crevasse, a military helicopter flew to the rescue. The copter crashed, and the pilot had to be rescued.
Often the rescued are in trouble simply because they took foolish risks.
"I fell down the hill. I really don't know what happened, but luckily, I got stopped by a tree before I fell off," one inebriated-looking man said on my special "You Can't Even Talk About It".
Some hike into treacherous weather with no warm clothing. Some go biking on the edge of a mountain. The Internet is crammed with examples of risky behavior.
Even mundane sports are treacherous if people are careless. Every winter, people go ice fishing on Lake Erie. Some use airboats, but many go out on foot or on four-wheelers. That's risky because the wind can open cracks in the ice. This winter when that happened, people called 911, and with great expense, 21 government agencies responded.
Sheriff Bob Bratton of Ottawa County, Mich., was angry that people ignored the weather and then needed to be saved. "There's no section in the law about stupidity because they could all be arrested today for that," he said.
But fisherman Randy Hayes defended taking his four-wheeler onto the ice. "You take a chance every time you go out there," he said.
But on this day there was a strong offshore wind, I reminded him.
"There's wind. There's cracks. It's just something you deal with."
"You're tying up emergency services," Sheriff Bratton said. "The helicopter that will be coming over from the Coast Guard? Four-thousand dollars an hour."
The rescue cost more than $250,000.
The sheriff thinks -- and I agree -- that the fishermen should pay for their rescue. But Rick Ferguson, who owns a bait shop in the vicinity, told me, "We already pay that in the tax dollars that we pay."
