|
Man freezes to death after city limits electricity
A 93-year-old man froze to death inside his home just days after the municipal power company restricted his use of electricity because of unpaid bills, officials said. I've got the utility companies right up there with the sleazy politicians they pay off on my poop list. They're rapacious unregulated monopolies with no more regard for their customers than we have for house flies. Marvin E. Schur died "a slow, painful death," said Kanu Virani, Oakland County's deputy chief medical examiner, who performed the autopsy. They cut his electricity in the dead of winter in Saginaw. Neighbors discovered Schur's body on Jan. 17. They said the indoor temperature was below 32 degrees at the time, The Bay City Times reported Monday. "Hypothermia shuts the whole system down, slowly," Virani said. "It's not easy to die from hypothermia without first realizing your fingers and toes feel like they're burning." 'Limiter' device installed Schur owed Bay City Electric Light & Power more than $1,000 in unpaid electric bills, Bay City Manager Robert Belleman told The Associated Press on Monday. If the rates are anything like they are around here that could represent 2-3 months of unpaid bills. He probably pissed the money away on food or mortgage or something frivolous like that. A city utility worker had installed a "limiter" device to restrict the use of electricity at Schur's home on Jan. 13, said Belleman. The device limits power reaching a home and blows out like a fuse if consumption rises past a set level. Power is not restored until the device is reset. Have to send a utility worker out to reset it, don't you? What was the temp in Saginaw yesterday? Don't tell me. Let me guess. No, even better, let me Google it: today the high was 18 degrees and the low was -4. Assuming Mr. Schur wasn't officially regarded as a housefly, he was murdered. You can't turn the electricity off in a 93-year-old man's house and not expect an untoward consequence that amounts to malice aforethought. The limiter was tripped sometime between the time of installation and the discovery of Schur's body, Belleman said. No! Reeeeally? He didn't know if anyone had made personal contact with Schur to explain how the device works.
The body was discovered by neighbor George Pauwels Jr. "His furnace was not running, the insides of his windows were full of ice the morning we found him," Pauwels told the Bay City News. The body was probably frozen solid. Power shut off if bills unpaid Belleman said city workers keep the limiter on houses for 10 days, then shut off power entirely if the homeowner hasn't paid utility bills or arranged to do so. He said Bay City Electric Light & Power's policies will be reviewed, but he didn't believe the city did anything wrong. "I've said this before and some of my colleagues have said this: Neighbors need to keep an eye on neighbors," Belleman said. "When they think there's something wrong, they should contact the appropriate agency or city department." The houseflies have to look out for each other. The city/power company isn't. Teddy Roosevelt had people like this in mind when he talked about malefactors of great wealth. Schur had no children and his wife had died several years ago. Bay City is on Saginaw Bay, just north of the city of Saginaw in central Michigan. Bastards. The rotten complacent, unfeeling, bastards. I hope Belleman and each and every one of the senior management of Bay City Electric Light & Power plus the faceless minion who put the "limiter" on the poor man's meter freeze to death themselves. I hope that when they're frail old men and women they're callously ignored by the pols in power then and that their bodies aren't discovered until spring, after their wiener dogs and yorkies have eaten most of them. Posted by: Fred 2009-01-27 |
|
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=260871 |