The Other Coast by Adrian Raeside for September 05, 2020

If it weren’t for stupid people you and your handler would be out of business.

tired and wet you can fix, stupid, not so much…

Adrian is likely inspired by the events on the North Shore mountains near Vancouver. This sort of thing happens with annoying regularity there.

Am I correct in my understanding that some States are now charging for Search and Rescue when negligence (aka stupidity) is involved?

I don’t know why people do this. I think they should be billed for some of the costs

Surprisingly they’re a lot of them getting lost in the mountains. The Rockies get a lot of these idiots!

And the same stupidity for the people who refuse to evacuate from raging wildfires or major hurricanes.

When my daughter first moved to Oregon she told her new friends that she would like to go white water rafting. They told her no it was too dangerous and that no locals do that.

Search and rescue works against Darwin’s Principle. Get the stupid ones out of rhe gene pool.

And in the morning he will be dry and rested, but still stupid.

See this a lot around here.

if you lose (stupidly sink) your car ice fishing here, you have to pay for it’s removal and some kind of environmental fee too.

And that’s why they can charge people for rescues

I went on survival training in the Rockies while in the military. It was for freshmen, so we were in a group of twelve with one upperclassmen. He had fresh milk and chocolate; we ate wild strawberry tea and caught one ground squirrel in a week. I lost twenty pounds. It was quite an experience; many of these guys had never missed a meal in their lives. You can walk quite a long way in a week, if you have to.

The worst part is that this isn’t his first time.

I was involved with search and rescue, off and on, for some thirty years. Sadly, this comic is definitely representative of a lot of SAR efforts.

There are also the false alarms. I’ve chased a lot more ELTs that went off “by accident” than ever went off for real. There were some honest mistakes and those can be forgiven, but many were just stupid mistakes that should never have happened.

My last search (before “retiring”) was for an aircraft that flew directly into a thunderstorm and disappeared from radar between COS and DEN. We found the plane scattered all over the ground. I heard tell that the ground team found a fire extinguisher that was flattened by the impact and that they had to count shoes to confirm the number on board. They came down out of that storm fast and hard.

The stupid bit was that many thunderstorms like that in this part of the country tend to be the big black cloud surrounded by blue skies. They could have easily flown around. Still a little risky due to hail and wind, but a lot safer than flying straight in. The only plus to the situation is that kind of stupid takes care of itself, unfortunately there was more than just the pilot on board and three others died because of one person’s poor decision making.