[BITList] $1.1 million rescue!

[CT's]

expensive sailing.................................!

ct

The Daily Beast calculates the cost of saving teen sailor Abby Sunderland-and the insanity didn't end there. Anna David on the family's reality TV outrage. Plus, parents who should be shot.


The story had all the makings of a gripping television show: an adventurous, photogenic 16-year-old makes an epic journey around the world and runs into trouble on the high seas. Would she make it or would she perish? And then the finale: She survived! Saved in the middle of the Indian Ocean by a glamorous-sounding French vessel that's delivering her safely back home!

Click the Image to View Our Gallery of Shockingly Bad Parents


 

Richard Hartog / AP Photo 
It sounds like nobody knew these potential teaser lines better than the girl's father, Laurence, a Thousand Oaks, California-based yacht manager who, along with his wife, Marianne, has raised and home-schooled Abby and her six siblings. Because on Monday, news broke that the Sunderlands had been working on a reality-television show documenting Abby's journey. A company called Magnetic Entertainment was behind it.

>From the sound of things, the Sunderlands could have used the extra income a hit show might net, as they say they spent roughly $140,000 to support Abby's older brother Zac's 'round-the-world sail last year.

But the cost of covering Zac's journey doesn't even make a small dent in what the Australian government had to spend to save Abby: The Australian government has promised not to charge Sunderland's family with the cost of her rescue-it's good maritime karma to help stranded sailors. Still, the rescue was a complex, expensive, and potentially dangerous undertaking. Two aircraft were used-a Qantas Airbus and a Global Express Jet-as well as three maritime vessels, the Ile De La Reunion, the Osiris, and the Skandi Bergen. Factoring the per-hour costs of the planes, using data from Privatefly and the cost of sidetracking those ships, using the U.S. Coast Guard's outside government standard rates for comparable seacraft-none of it cheap considering that Sunderland was stranded roughly 2,299 miles off the western coast of Australia, roughly 24 hours from any other boats-The Daily Beast estimates that the charter and operations costs involved in the rescue tops $1.1 million.








-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.bcn.mythic-beasts.com/pipermail/bitlist/attachments/20100615/96271829/attachment-0001.shtml 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 65685 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.bcn.mythic-beasts.com/pipermail/bitlist/attachments/20100615/96271829/attachment-0001.jpe 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/octet-stream
Size: 2191 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.bcn.mythic-beasts.com/pipermail/bitlist/attachments/20100615/96271829/attachment-0001.obj