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SALT LAKE CITY — When faced with the need to hoist someone out of the backcountry, Davis County Search and Rescue Commander Erik Bornemeier said his first call is to Life Flight.
However, Life Flight is not permitted to hoist at night or over water, he said.
Keith Simpson, a paramedic with Life Flight, said when it’s dark and there are mountains and trees and people, it’s a hazardous environment.
“Many SAR teams have spent long nights waiting for the dawn to bring someone out, because the terrain is too difficult for patient transport,” Bornemeier said. “I can call the state EOC (emergency operations center) to get the National Guard helicopters, but there is a lot of red tape, and by law they have to recoup the cost of the rescue.
“This is a huge speed bump in the rescue process and oftentimes leads to prolonged rescue times and diminished patient care. We have such a great resource with our MedEvac teams. It's just really hard to get them called out when I need them.”
If a sheriff’s department were to call on a Black Hawk, they would have to pay for the cost of the rescue, and it costs about $4,000 per hour to operate a Black Hawk, Bornemeier said.
“So that’s the hesitancy of the sheriff’s departments is … they’re like … we would love to call them out, but there’s a cost of who’s going to pay for it,” Bornemeier said. “And so if we could ensure, if we could set aside that legislation, a bill and the pot of money that answered that question, then that would be a way easier day for us.”
He said he would love if legislators created a bill that would, for $250,000, allow the National Guard 60 hours of rescue helicopter time. “So there’s two things that need to happen,” Bornemeier said. “We need to streamline the process of approval, and then we need to have a little pot of money that would pay, once these guys are launched, then that money would go to pay for those services.”
MedEvac is a somewhat new service in Utah, so it isn’t that anyone dropped the ball on the situation, Bornemeier said, but search and rescue commanders are tired of waiting on the hill overnight when they could transport people off the mountain quicker. “And what that would do is that would improve patient care time so our outcomes for our patients who are injured would dramatically increase. And then our rescuers that are out there — and a lot of the rescue teams are volunteers — they could get home faster. And so a lot would be accomplished if we did these two things,” Bornemeier said.
