A little off subject I know, but Falcon Heene’s—the “Balloon Boy”—parents were presented a bill of $36,000 for the full rescue operations costs in 2009.
To my knowledge, the costs for rescue operations are normally charged to the person or persons being rescued (when not a natural disaster). That does not mean those fees are collected, however. In the situation that Mazo is presenting, the choice is not “yes” and “no.” It’s “sometimes yes” and “sometimes no.” The government provides rescuers part of the time, so the surfers need to get on board (no pun intended) and accept what the government is offering; otherwise, the risk is entirely their own.
I read this yesterday and thought about this thread. The decision of many local governments was to ban this extreme sport.
The Early, Deadly Days of Motorcycle Racing
It was in 1911 that a livery worker named Ashley Franklin Van Order moved from Illinois to Southern California so he could ride his motorcycle year-round. Van Order took a job selling Harley-Davidsons and began riding competitively, but his racing career was cut short soon afterward by an accident, followed by an ultimatum. “His wife, Lilly, told him that if he ever rode again, she was out of there,” says Van Order’s grandson . . .
The races must have been spectacular for people who were accustomed to thinking of horsepower in terms of actual horses. The bikes were designed to run fast, and that was about it: they had to be towed behind other motorcycles to get them started, and they had no brakes. The tracks, called motordromes, came in various sizes—a circuit of a mile and a quarter occupied the current site of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills—and were made of lengths of 2-by-2 and 2-by-4 lumber with rough-cut surfaces. The turns were severely banked, allowing riders to reach speeds of more than 100 miles an hour. Crashes were frequent and horrific—riders who went down faced being impaled by splinters—and often fatal. Spectators shared in the risk: at many motordromes, they peered down from the lip of the track, in harm’s way. On one particularly lethal day in 1912, several observers—from four to six, accounts vary—were killed along with Eddie Hasha and another rider at a motordrome in Newark, New Jersey, when Hasha lost control of his bike and slammed into the crowd.
. . . . By the mid-‘20s, the sport began to lose its appeal. Perhaps the novelty wore off; certainly the carnage was appalling. Newspapers began referring to motordromes as “murderdromes,” and local governments closed some tracks. . . .
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-c...le-Racing.html
Everyone will end up in jail. 
