My Friend Willy Ritch, who sailed for many years with his young family, wrote this incredibly insightful post on this topic that has been headlining national news lately. If you have been following this at all, please continue reading: A few people have asked what I think about this story. The short version is that the rescue was the result of some incredibly well trained men and women who did their jobs with courage and dedication and didnt do it for the publicity. And as to the cost—the direct medical cost of childhood obesity in America would pay for one $25,000 rescue at sea every sixty seconds—or slightly more than half a million of those rescues every year. The longer version is this: All those questions prompted me to think about it—and the 4 or so years at sea we spent with Elin and Sally—starting when Sal was 5 or 6 months old. We sailed up and down the East Coast, to the Bahamas, the Yucatan and Guatemala before Sally turned two. And when Elin was 8 and Sally 5 we crossed the Atlantic together. I wouldnt trade a moment of it and have never had a second thought. Whenever we thought about going offshore I always thought that if we got in serious trouble, we could call for help. But I also knew we would be asking other people to risk their lives for us—and (hopefully) we never took unnecessary risks and didnt take those decisions lightly. We did call for help once—when a boat we had just bought started to sink between Trinidad and Grenada. The help never arrived; we repaired the leak and made it back to port on our own. (What I am sure of: long sailing trips with little kids arent as scary or risky as a lot of people probably think. And one-year olds, while kind of defenseless, arent exactly fragile.) You could argue that taking a 1 year old so far from shore was an unnecessary risk. Maybe thats true but I just find it hard to second guess this family. I do wonder, though, if this was a couple in their late 60s and the husband had a previous heart attack and had to be rescue for chest pains…would the criticism be the same? Its probably reasonable to ask what the costs involved were. According to the story on NBC tonight, it could be in the tens of thousands of dollars. I thought it would be good to put that in perspective. The cost of running the USS Vandergrift—the destroyer that picked up that family—is between $15 million and $20 million a year, or about $40,000 a day on the low end. The cost of running the Coast Guard—which proved its worth in coordinating this very complicated rescue-- is somewhere a little over $10 billion a year, or about $2,000 a minute. Of course this rescue happened because of a choice this family made—so back to the obesity thing. Childhood obesity is a cost associated, to a certain extent, with choices-and it costs about $14 billion a year. Or about one of those $25,000 rescue at sea every 63 seconds. Or the cost of fires at home—the numbers are about the same. So we could fill up the news every night about a family who endangered their child and cost us tens of thousands of dollars because they fed them too much KFC or smoked in bed and started a fire and be outraged about the parents. Or maybe we could just be grateful that there were some men and women who saved the childs life because they were trained to be a doctor or fight a fire or jump out of a plane into the ocean. Willy Ritch
Posted on: Wed, 09 Apr 2014 01:45:12 +0000
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