I may not have written a treatise on the subject, but I don't think that at all.
However if they failed to save someone in more danger at the time, that would have been a scandal and not just an expense.
If they have to work overtime that week, yes. But if they worked 37 hours and because of the guy in the tree, they have to be in the air
40 hours, then it wouldn't cost more. I don't consider being in the air or doing other mandatory chores 37 hours in a week to be "sitting around all the time".If they really spend every minute of their time in the air doing rescues etc. or on their way to do one, they should plan for busy days and buy another helicopter and hire another crew.
Although I wouldn't mind billing the guy something, but you can't make it so much that people will fall out of trees rather than call rescue.
We don't charge for the fire department to come, even though almost all fires are started by someone's, usually a resident's, stupid mistake. I think this was Benjamin Franklin's idea, and before him, there were profit-making fire departments, and they would come, and they would negotiate with the owner about how much he would pay them to put out the fire, while his building was burning down. Franklin didn't like this system.
(I found out that in NYS, if you hit those very big yellow or orange barrels at the fork at expresway exit ramps, they charge you for each barrel you damage and the sand inside. It was about 200 or 300 dollars each 25 years ago! That seems like a lot of money. I had assumed they were like party favors for bad drivers.
Again, I was trying to be brief, something readers here know comes as a challenge to me. I never said the whole PD, and even if the Coast Guard doesn't have departments, it has some subdivision, if only for accounting, that either includes helicopter operations, or rescue operations, or something like that. I don't think 10 thouasand will pay for the whole PD for that time, and what I meant was that if you take the annual budget, divide by the hours in the year and multiply by the hours it takes to do the rescue (3?),
then divide by the number of employees in the department or the number that deal with the public, and multiply by the number that were involved in the rescue, that might be how they calculate the cost.
Anyhow, I'm just going to think about Oren's approval of hamsterality now.