Costs can rise quickly, sometimes into millions
By Martin Kasindorf
USA TODAY
Copyright 2006 Gannett Company, Inc.
All Rights Reserved
LOS ANGELES — A spate of highly publicized searches for people lost in wilderness is reviving debate over whether the subjects of a search should reimburse rescuers.
Since Saturday, civilian volunteers and military personnel have been searching for three experienced climbers trapped by snowstorms on Oregon’s 11,239-foot Mount Hood.
Earlier this month, more than 100 searchers tracked missing motorist James Kim and his family for seven days in freezing southwestern Oregon mountains. Kim’s wife and two young daughters were rescued. Kim was found dead.
Deputy Gerry Tiffany, spokesman for the Hood River County sheriff’s office, said its office does not charge for its searches. The same is true for where Kim was lost, Josephine County Undersheriff Brian Anderson said.
The no-pay policy is the norm nationwide.
The Coast Guard and other federal agencies don’t make rescued persons responsible for expenses. In 2000, troubled by frequent rescues on 20,320-foot Mount McKinley, the National Park Service considered recovering search costs from Denali National Park climbers.
Mountaineering groups protested and in a compromise climbers now pay a $200 fee to help fund the Alaskan park’s mountaineering program, which includes safety briefings before climbs, park spokeswoman Kris Fister says.
3 states allow cost recovery
Colorado, Utah and Oregon have state laws that allow their agencies to charge victims for rescues, says Randy Servis, president of the National Association for Search and Rescue, a training and education organization. Servis says he expects the issue of cost recovery to be examined soon by other states.
“It’s a cyclical issue that comes up periodically, and it tends to come up with high-profile cases like this one on Mount Hood,” he says. “It’s usually attached to people doing extreme sports — rock climbing, winter mountaineering, skiing out of bounds, things above the norm. The question arises: Should these people pay for the cost of search and rescue?”
Oregon passed its law in 1995 amid a public outcry over three college students who cost taxpayers $10,000 for a search on Mount Hood. The climbers turned up safe, warm and playing cards in their tent. They hadn’t carried a cellphone or a radio locator beacon.
Some officials involved in searches say it’s bad public policy to ask victims to pay for rescues. Washington state doesn’t have such a law, “and we don’t want one,” says Sgt. John Urquhart of the King County, Wash., sheriff’s office. “We’re afraid that people would not call us to rescue them soon enough because they’d fear getting a bill.”
On Nov. 20, a King County helicopter spotted Cindy Wysocki, 31, a Seattle lawyer, near death in the Cascade Mountains after she got lost on a snowshoeing outing. A Navy helicopter arrived an hour later to hoist the woman out. She recovered and wasn’t charged.
Sheriffs in Oregon enforce the cost-recovery law only “when people do really dumb things,” Tiffany says.
A few places depart from the general policy of not sending a bill. Grand County in southern Utah, citing unaffordable costs, regularly charges hikers, off-road drivers and mountain bikers for fetching them to safety. Bills for getting lost in the rocky scenery near the county seat of Moab average about $600, according to Nyland.
An Idaho law allows ski resorts to charge up to $4,000 for saving out-of-bounds skiers. Ski areas in most states lack legal authority to charge for searches, Servis says.
The Coconino National Forest, landlord of the Arizona Snowbowl ski area near Flagstaff, cracks down with a federal trespassing citation when a skier ducks under a rope and gets lost on back slopes without a permit. Skiers convicted in U.S. District Court are ordered to make restitution that averages about $4,000 for search costs, Servis says.
Hoaxers get little sympathy
Leniency goes out the window in many places when people make hoax reports of emergencies. The Coast Guard seeks reimbursement for all-out searches triggered by false reports. In 2005, Jennifer Wilbanks, the “runaway bride” who disappeared four days before her scheduled wedding and phoned her fiance with a phony tale of being abducted, was ordered by a judge to pay $15,800 to Georgia city and county officials who had searched for her.
At $5,000 an hour to operate a large helicopter, searches can get expensive. Examples:
- A 12-day search in 2003 for a small plane that crashed on Arizona’s San Francisco Peaks cost the federal government and local counties $2 million, Servis says.
- In June, authorities spent 11 days and $127,000 searching for Sue Nott, 36, and Karen McNeill, 37, on Mount Foraker in Denali National Park. The women weren’t found.
Charlie Shimanski, vice president of the Mountain Rescue Association, a national organization of volunteer search-and-rescue teams, says multiday searches “are the anomalies.” He says that “90% of search and rescue operations are over within 2 1/2 hours. The only costs are my time and my tank of gas. The sheriff might incur a couple hours’ overtime for a deputy.”
Keeping costs down, unpaid volunteer units do most of the grunt work in searches, says Shimanski, who heads a mountain rescue unit in Evergreen, Colo. Ski Patrol members help searchers at no charge to lost skiers, Shimanski says.
“We try to scrape by on our own money,” says Christopher Hodgdon, president of Southern Search and Rescue in Kaufman, Texas.