Jim Kennedy said:
>And as for the costs, maybe the EMS was getting paid to be there (maybe not,
>some of them might have been off-duty),
snip
>I suspect that there were some other expendables added in to the total also,
>such as phone wire, food, batteries, and so on. Yes, these things do add up.
>Very quickly.
I was not involved with the Airman's rescue in question, so I do not know
what direct costs there might have been. No doubt there were some. However it
is very common for agencies to report costs which are not directly related to
the incident at hand, and it seems like they try to make them as large as
possible. Maybe this is ammunition they can use to request a larger budget for
themselves. As an example, when we were flown to Mexico for the Brinco rescue
back in '78 it was widely reported that it cost taxpayers something like
$300,000 because the Air Force flew a couple of truckloads of cavers and their
trucks to Victoria. However the crew of the plane told us that they were glad
to get to do something different, and that if they hadn't been flying us they
would have been flying some training mission. That means that the cost of the
flights (crew, equipment, fuel) cannot rightly be called a cost of the rescue,
because that is money that would have been spent anyway. The same goes for any
rescue personnel anywhere who are simply doing their jobs and would have been
paid whether or not a given rescue had occurred. One always has to take such
accounts of expenses with a grain of salt.
Nevertheless, I agree with Julie that that is not really the point.
Keeping specific information about cave locations and any "unprofessional"
behavior that may occur out of the public domain can only be a benefit to
cavers. (And I'm not saying there was any unseemly behavior involved in this
case - I haven't seen the YouTube videos due to my slow modem Internet
connection.)
Mark Minton
