What is the price of evacuation?

July 15, 2006 5:53 PM

After reading this (second to last paragraph) and thinking about this situation, how much do they charge you for evacuation?

I was curious if you get some percentage of a huge bill for the cost of the operation, or just the plane ticket from the airliner from Cypress.

Has the US always charged for emergency evacuation?

posted by haplesschild to law & government (6 comments total)

As far as I know, they don't get charged anything for the part of it done by the military.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 6:05 PM on July 15, 2006

It is unclear from the writing, and from it's conflict with what Steven says (which would be *my* expectation as well) whether that graf means "we'll pay for your commercial ticket home from Cyprus" or "C-130's cost $4000/hr to operate. Divide that by 90 people and multiply by 2". :-)
posted by baylink at 6:13 PM on July 15, 2006

As Steven notes, I don't think that evacuees are charged for the military transport from the point of danger to the designated "safe place" (that's your tax dollars at work) but they are, after that, on their own hook for lodging, food and transportation charges.

The CNN article mentions "repatriation loans," and the State Department's statement talks about "promissory notes," so I don't think that anyone in this situation would be left in a dangerous place due to lack of ability to immediately pay.
posted by enrevanche at 6:17 PM on July 15, 2006

Crap. Here's the correct link to the State Dept statement.
posted by enrevanche at 6:18 PM on July 15, 2006

A person I know who works for the State Department supervised the evacuation of US citizens from a warzone a couple of years ago. He said a military plane was sent to evacuate embassy staff to Germany. The plane was going to leave nearly empty, so he suggested they take civilians. The military crew reluctantly agreed but said they would charge full commercial fare. All the US citizens in that country managed to find totally free spots on French and Italian evacuation flights and the US flight left empty (since in the end embassy personnel did not leave).
posted by thirteenkiller at 7:19 PM on July 15, 2006

Part of this stance on the part of the U.S. State Department may be to preserve State's ability to act as a guarantor of payment for private charter craft, without actually being the charter. The rationale there is that parties in the area may balk at allowing U.S. interests to directly participate in an evacuation, but those same parties may allow private operators under other flags to enter and depart Lebanese waters and airspace for humanitarian purposes, even to the point of allowing private American citizens passage on foreign flag vessels.

In this situation, no one yet knows who is going to oppose what, or how forcefully, and it makes sense to keep all publicly discussed options open.
posted by paulsc at 7:42 PM on July 15, 2006