The Never-Ending Debate Over Who Deserves to Be Rescued
In 2017, as Hurricane Harvey came barreling toward Texas, Patrick Rios, the mayor of a coastal community called Rockport, had a morbid message for residents who might consider ignoring an evacuation order. “We’re suggesting if people are going to stay here, mark their arm with a Sharpie marker with their name and Social Security number,” Rios warned would-be holdouts. No first responders’ lives would be risked to help them, and should they die, the marking would help identify them.
Whether Rios’s description actually dissuaded residents from waiting out a hurricane at home is difficult to measure, but now it is a common refrain when hurricanes approach. When people—citing an aversion to government mandates, a fear of leaving their home, an eagerness to protect their pets, or just a desire to enjoy the adventure—make choices that put themselves at unreasonable risk, they need a reminder that those decisions could have horrific consequences. You want your freedom and adventure? Sure. Here’s a marker.
The recent search for the Titan—an uncertified submersible craft that disappeared while carrying passengers to view the wreck of the Titanic, reportedly for $250,000 each—raised a perennial debate in the disaster-response field: How far should public agencies go in attempting to save people in harm’s way? Responders are conditioned to save lives, but when individuals behave incautiously, how aggressively should rescuers work to save them? Similar questions arise on remote hiking trails in bad weather and along America’s coasts every summer as hurricane season intensifies.
Emergency-management agencies in the United States and other Western powers have far-reaching capabilities to save lives. But their abilities are not magical. Fundamentally, people need to be partners in their own safety.
[Read: How could this have happened?]
The heroic actions of first responders can lull the citizens of well-functioning countries into overlooking or minimizing risks. (Similarly, plutocrats, who usually have the option of throwing a little money at problems that arise, may similarly be lulled into complacency.) This tendency is likely to cause greater heartbreak in the future, especially as climate change unleashes unpredictable and catastrophic harms upon the world. In coming years, the arms of government that protect Americans from physical harm must be prepared to deal with events of enormous consequence—disasters that threaten the well-being of large groups of people, that force many of us to rethink where we live, that raise profound questions about how we protect ourselves against nature.
The Titan disaster was nothing of the sort.
The submersible’s disappearance off the coast of Newfoundland prompted a frantic and expensive search. Under international maritime conventions, nations are required to assist “vessels in distress.” And the episode had everything to garner worldwide attention: a company that avoided regulation by operating in international waters; ill-fated, wealthy adventurers; a connection to the Titanic; and the nightmarish possibility that the passengers were still alive, conscious of their depleting oxygen, waiting to be rescued. (The internet abounded with schadenfreude about the Titan’s peril, as if billionaires don’t have loved ones too.)
For a while, it seemed possible that the vessel was floating on the ocean’s surface—or at least was close enough to it to be accessible to rescuers. Yet that outcome was highly unlikely. And had the vessel somehow been found intact on the seafloor—the remains of the Titanic rest at a depth well below where the ocean pressure is sufficient to crush a naval submarine—rescuers would have no clear way to bring the submersible back to the surface. The search ultimately determined that the vessel had experienced a “catastrophic implosion” about 1,600 feet from the wreckage of the Titanic.
Some commentators have faulted the U.S. Coast Guard for its limited capacity to conduct deep-sea rescues. But in general, governments should concentrate their contingency planning on high-probability events such as climate disasters and cyberattacks—and on low-probability ones, such as global pandemics, that have unusual disruptive power. Although the Coast Guard needs to be adept at marine rescues immediately off U.S. shores, the deployment of ships, aviation surveillance, and personnel always involves some risk to responders, and developing the capacity to quickly find and rescue vessels deep under the ocean simply can’t be a priority.
Authorities in Canada and the U.S. are conducting post-event studies to learn from the Titan disaster. An appropriate policy response might involve more stringent regulation of submersibles by the U.S. and international organizations, and greater transparency for extreme-tourism buffs about the risks they are taking on. And nothing more. Governments aren’t to blame for every accidental death and should studiously avoid creating the impression that they’re capable of coming to the rescue in every circumstance.
[Juliette Kayyem: The day ‘stop the bleed’ entered civilian life]
Every year, “selfie stick” deaths occur at tourist destinations when eager photographers back over cliffs or into other hazards in pursuit of the perfect shot. Official safety precautions cannot always make up for a lack of sufficient prudence by individual travelers.
Bill Booth, a skydiving legend, reportedly noted that parachuting deaths remained constant even as safety features in parachute equipment got better in the late 1970s. A saying known as Booth’s Rule No. 2 holds that the safer the equipment, the more risks skydivers and base jumpers will take because of overconfidence: performing complex aerial maneuvers, pulling the rip cord at lower altitudes, traversing dangerous terrain while seeking spots to jump from. The government could do little to alter this fact. Ultimately, the death rate for parachuters began to plummet as they recognized the risks and altered their own behavior.
If asking people to take more responsibility for their safety sounds Darwinian, it is no different than asking hurricane holdouts to write their name on their arm or telling those in harm’s way—via the motto “First 72 on you”—to prepare for three days without any assistance. Several states leave open the possibility of charging climbers and other adventurers for any rescues if they set out unprepared or in violation of safety warnings.
The world is filled with an infinite number of risks, and societies have to make hard choices about which ones merit a collective response. If people know when protecting their own safety is truly up to them, they may adjust their own calculations about whether to ride out a hurricane, lean over a cliff for a selfie, or board an experimental submarine.