[MikeG]

So you’re off track, your way forward and your way back is blocked, some in your party are becoming hypothermic and the wind and rain is getting worse by the hour. It’s time to pull the Personal Locator Beacon (PLB) but its owner has not enough feeling in their hands to do it!

My mate Josh Tabor found himself in this situation late last year in the Tararuas. His story is equal parts entertaining, gripping and enlightening.

Most tramping talks are about great trips in nice sunshine that end up at a coffee shop with smiles on everyone’s faces. This isn’t one of those talks – it contains valuable lessons about how a series of individually sensible decisions snowball to lead you into trouble, and what you need to do to avoid getting into a bad situation and then how to survive that situation once you’re there.

It also dispels the myth that if you set off a PLB then you’ll be safely in a warm helicopter half an hour later. You’ll learn how a Search and Rescue response operates and what you can do to make yourself easier to be rescued.

This talk will be great preparation for your next outdoors adventure – how to see warning signs of things going wrong, how to work as a team to avoid bad outcomes and cope with them if they do happen.

See you down at Tararua Hall this Wednesday!

[MikeM]

Hello.

Thanks for organising this and thanks to Josh. As I commented afterwards, it’s really uncommon for someone who’s been through this type of thing to come out afterwards and speak about bad decisions and the experience, especially analysing it so frankly in a forum where they’re open to criticism. IMHO talking about this type of stuff helps a lot for learning, much moreso than sweeping it under the rug.

One bit which got my attention was that Josh said towards the end of questions that he’d been told by Police that they “could be held accountable for costs” if Police chose to go that way, even though they rarely if ever do.

Without trying to get into a boring debate about whether people should be liable for rescue costs or not, does anyone know the mechanism for this? My understanding is that it’s probably a false claim by Police, if that’s really what was said.

As far as I’m aware, there’s nothing specific in law to allow Police to recover costs from rescued people. I asked Police directly a couple of years ago when I saw a similar claim in media, and was eventually directed to section 24 of the Summary Offences Act, which is basically about wasting Police time. The key thing with that clause is that you need be intentionally causing wasteful deployment, which to me means you need to know in your own mind that you’re causing rescue services to come out unnecessarily. eg. Maybe you dialed 111 and knowingly reported a false missing person, or hid from rescuers for a laugh when you noticed them searching for you. It’s also a criminal prosecution rather than a cost recovery for rescue, but maybe a court could order some sort of cost recovery as a consequence if Police proved things. I’m not too clear on what the court can do here.

The other potential avenue for penalties is if there’s a PLB activation and the RCCNZ responds. The closest the RCCNZ seems to be able to do, which they made big media storm about in early 2013, after picking what seemed like a fairly bizarre case to do it, is to go after someone under Radiocommunications Regulations, for broadcasting on a frequency that’s reserved for emergencies when it’s not an emergency, which they initially claimed at that time before quietly backing off several months later and saying it’d been appropriate. That’s contentious for usual reasons, plus it’s more of a fine imposed for polluting the radio spectrum than a direct cost recovery for commissioning of resources. It could just create an incentive to avoid carrying a PLB in exchange for something like a SPOT or similar, which broadcasts its emergency signals over commercial satphone frequencies, albeit less reliably in some circumstances.

Am I thinking right with this, or are there other mechanisms for cost recovery for Police and the RCCNZ? To me, short of a comprehensive law change, the legal possibilities seem like a few flaky technicalities at best. I’m sceptical of any official who tries to say that it’s possible to recover rescue costs from a rescued party.

Clearly this is not to say that the services should be abused by poor trip planning and preparation, or that you shouldn’t necessarily donate money to rescue services if that’s what you’d like to do.

Cheers.
MikeM.

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