Ongoing mountain sports boom: Many Germans do not pay for their rescue operations

With the ongoing boom in mountaineering, reports of unpaid bills after rescue operations are also piling up.

In Italy, nearly 40 percent of those who have used a helicopter rescue service since 2020 have not paid the bill, Corriere della Sera reported.

According to this, German mountaineers are in the first place among those unwilling to pay.

Meanwhile, the number of accidents and emergencies involving members of the German Alpine Association (DAV) continues to fall.

This emerges from the DAV accident statistics, which were presented on Wednesday in Munich.

Between November 1, 2020 and October 31, 2021, 32 DAV members had fatal accidents in the mountains.

In relation to the increased number of members, the quota remained the same as in the report in the previous year.

The number of accidents and emergencies fell by a quarter compared to 2020. According to the DAV, this is a historic low.

The number of accidents in the reporting period was strongly influenced by the corona pandemic and by calls for more defensive behavior in mountaineering.

The DAV attributes the fact that the number of accidents has fallen sharply, especially in winter 2020/2021, to the closed ski areas during the pandemic.

The statistics show a very marked decrease in the number of accidents from March to May 2020 and from December 2020 to April 2021.

However, the Alpine Club continues to record most accidents while hiking.

Every second fatal accident was a hiking accident.

Accidents were mainly caused by falls.

The declining number of accidents that the DAV is finding among its members does not match the general trend.

According to Bavarian police statistics, 55 people died in mountain accidents last year in southern Upper Bavaria alone.

This is the highest level since records began in 2009. In the first half of 2022, 30 people died in mountain accidents in southern Upper Bavaria - in the same period last year there were 19. The Bavarian police will therefore use eight more powerful new police helicopters from 2023, which will do twice as much can transport as many rescue workers or patients as before, as the Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann (CSU) announced a few weeks ago.

Because the number of alpine accidents is also increasing in Austria and Switzerland, the DAV suspects that the mountaineering boom is not reflected in its number of members, i.e. relatively more non-DAV members are on the road than before and the members are better trained for alpine terrain and may be more defensive.