This story was originally published by MinnPost.
During this year’s mild Minnesota winter, counties around the state have been spending money and manpower on search and rescue missions of people who wandered out onto unsafe thin ice.
The Beltrami County Sheriff’s Department has responded to at least nine ice rescues — one of them on the Upper Red Lake in December when 122 people became stranded on an ice floe. In a typical ice season, which can span from the end of November through the first weeks of March, the county sees half a dozen to a dozen ice rescues, Sheriff Jason Riggs said.
Beltrami County doesn’t specifically budget for ice rescues, instead estimating how many it will likely respond to in a season, Riggs said, though costs vary depending on the size and magnitude of the operation. Transporting people off the ice can be costly — and so can recovery efforts when workers are looking for bodies or vehicles.
Cass County, meanwhile, went over its search and rescue budget after its dive team (part of a tri-county team) assisted in a search and rescue on Lake of the Woods at the end of December when a Bombardier tracked vehicle fell through the ice, Sheriff Bryan Welk said.
To counter such stresses on local budgets, a bill in the Legislature would allow counties to collect reimbursements for ice search and rescues — not only for open water rescues, for which current law allows. The money would come from state or DNR coffers.
On Thursday, the Senate Committee on Environment, Climate and Legacy took testimony on the bill for possible inclusion in an omnibus package.
The bill initially included a section that would have required people who wandered onto closed off areas to cover the costs of their own rescue, but that was taken out at the Senate hearing. Sen. Justin Eichorn, R-Grand Rapids — one of the bill’s authors — said he worried that stranded people might not call for help if they were concerned about covering the bill.
Thought they were already covered
Welk said he thought the Lake of the Woods rescue would be reimbursed, especially since it was outside of the county’s jurisdiction. But after talking with the Department of Natural Resources, he learned that that was a false assumption and that the reimbursement was only for open-water rescues.
“I’m like, ‘You gotta be kidding me,’” he said. “So I looked into it, and sure enough, if it was on the ice you couldn’t get reimbursed but if it was during the summer months with open water, you could get reimbursed, and that just didn’t make sense to me.”
The state currently reimburses 50% of the costs for open water search and rescues up to $2,500.
Welk reached out to Rep. Ben Davis, R-Merrifield, one of the representatives for his county. Davis was also surprised when he heard about the current law.
“In Minnesota, you know, you can have 50 degrees one day, and zero degrees the next day,” he said. “One day you could have a search and rescue on a lake, a body of water where the sheriff’s department does get somewhat of a reimbursement for search and rescue. And the following day, when there could be a quarter inch of ice and someone thinks, ‘Oh, I’m gonna walk out on the ice’ and they fall through and they gotta get rescued, there’s no reimbursement for sheriff’s departments.”
After conversations with some sheriffs, he brought forward the House version of the legislation. Both the House and Senate bills have bipartisan authorship.
“I think that’s a great idea to help maybe possibly fund some of those things,” said Riggs, the Beltrami County sheriff.
Right now, the costs fall on local taxpayers and the fire department, he said, even though the lakes in Beltrami County attract people from different cities and states for fishing.
“A lot of people from Iowa, Wisconsin, southern Minnesota, North and South Dakota — they come to Northern Minnesota to ice fish and a lot of times those are the folks that find themselves in trouble because they’re just not as familiar with our area lakes and some of the concerns that are out there when it comes to ice safety,” he said.
Search and rescue costs
Davis said funding needs vary because some counties have more lakes and end up doing more search and rescue operations. Right now, he said, there’s no tracking mechanism for the total cost of ice rescues in the state because it’s covered by counties, not a statewide entity.
The resources that go into a typical rescue generally include personnel costs, such as staffing for a couple of hours of work, sometimes on overtime, Riggs said. The equipment needed for an ice recovery, however, gets more costly. He estimated that the effort on Upper Red Lake cost the county around $3,000-$4,000.
Those costs also reduce the availability of services to residents of the area.
“It seems like (those resources) were constantly being utilized this last early winter. Those are resources that can’t be used for something else like if there happened to be a fire or another ice rescue somewhere else, these folks are all tied up,” Riggs said.
Eichorn said during the committee hearing that the funds would be especially important for Northern Minnesota counties that have lots of public land but don’t have the same tax base as other counties.
Varying weather conditions also make it hard to predict how much the state will need to budget for the reimbursements. “It’s difficult to project just what this is going to cost the state because like last year we had good ice,” Davis said. “This year, (that’s) not the case.”
At least three ice search and rescue missions have taken place in Cass County this season. The dive team hasn’t been deployed for any of them, however, which means a lower comparative cost. Welk said ice rescues are generally more dangerous.
“Not every year is like this year, but certainly we have seen the toll it takes on the sheriff’s office,” Welk said at the hearing.
Different types of rescues
Open-water rescues can take more days and personnel because of the expansiveness of the water, making them more costly, too, Davis said. Depending on the extent of the ice search and rescue, sometimes there’ll need to be a dive team and special equipment. But these operations generally are quicker than in open water, he said.
Cass County is part of a three-county dive team that also includes Beltrami and Hubbard counties. Since they have the staffing for that team, Welk said he wants them to be able to help out in areas that lack dive teams.
“Not every county has that same resource,” he said. “And we’d like to be available and help out wherever we can with mutual aid. Something like this would be to get some of the expenses back. Trying to recover some of those costs was our hope.”
The bill increases the amount of reimbursement to 50% of the total costs incurred up to a maximum of $5,000 per event for ice search and rescues. In the proposed legislation, the reimbursement dollar amount for open-water rescues stays the same as before.
“It’s a common sense change to a law,” Welk said.
This article first appeared on MinnPost and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.