New Zealand: Mother on Oxygen Pump Dies After Power Cut
May 31st, 2007Profits.
Via: CNN:
A 44-year-old woman who needed an electric oxygen pump to breathe died after an energy company cut the power to her home because of a $122 unpaid bill, her family claimed Wednesday.
Police said they had launched an investigation into Folole Muliaga’s death, which happened within two hours of state-owned company Mercury Energy cutting power to her house Tuesday.
Mercury Energy’s general manager, James Moulder, said the company was devastated by the woman’s death and was conducting its own investigation to determine what happened. (Watch as devastated husband and children tell their story)
Muliaga, a schoolteacher with four children between the ages of 5 and 20, had been off work since February with an illness and had fallen behind in her payments to Mercury, said Brenden Sheehan, a relative who provided a copy of the bill.
Relative says family warned company rep she needed machine
Six days before a Mercury Energy representative arrived Tuesday at the house to disconnect the electricity, she was $122 in arrears.
Sheehan said both Muliaga and her son told the technician she was dependent on the oxygen machine to stay alive and invited him into the house to see it. “Then he cut the power off,” Sheehan told The Associated Press.
Muliaga began having difficulty breathing, became faint and then collapsed, he said. Paramedics were unable to revive her, and she was pronounced dead within two hours of the power being cut.
Research Credit: AT
That is so fucked!!
I remember while visiting some expat Americans in Christchurch about how they got their utilities all hooked up and they were amazed at how easy going the Kiwi’s were at the utilities company… not like what they expected in the States so this incident seems pretty bizarre.
If you take the business mentality as an end goal, yes, profits. As an isolated case given the conflicting information, no. This person’s demise is not as a direct result of a drive for profit. Might be many other things: incompetence, miscommunication, stupidity, but there are too many conflicting reports this early on to know who those labels apply to. People lie. Victims, media and corporates alike dependant on their motivation or situation.
Besides… it’s all propaganda, one way or another, ay?
Not to play uber-cynic or anything, but what is a woman whose survival depends on oxygen doing without battery backup or some fallback plan in case of outage??
And what is the local hospital and the doctor who prescribed the oxygen doing?
Even had the electric company not cut her off, have they never heard of blackouts, or lightning, or a short in the power supply to the house??
At the very least, why didn’t they get her to the hospital (or a friend with electricity) as soon as the power went out, or call EMS before she passed out & suffocated?
In the times to come, governments and facilities and powers-that-be are going to be less and less dependable or trustworthy, and “the way things work” isn’t going to resemble what we’re used to. People need to get off the expectation grid before it drops out from under them, & pulls them down with it.
Waaay back when it what seems another lifetime to me I was in charge of cutting off customers for non payment of their water and sewer utility bills. God almighty. I thought I wiped this from my memory banks. This is not a job I recommend to anyone.
Peoples clothed in very important family names that any one of us around the world would recognize just could not be bothered with paying a $4.85 monthly utility bill.
I was sooooo glad to quit that job. In fact one female who hissed at me for about an hour, calling me a Yankee and other insults changed my life for the better. I real-eye-zed I really did not belong in the genteel country south of the Mason-Dixon line. But we NEVER cut off a person’s service as described above. This appears to be negligent homicide. Karin H, when a person needs oxygen to survive, that IS the “backup plan.” In the U.S. you have to file with the electric company and have your “doctors excuse” to get into the queue to be the “first” to get your electricity turned on after an outage due to medical necessity. And those battery backups? A little less than a thousand US that comes out of pocket. Oh and don’t forget, that $122 in arrears, in this as in many cases – its always the money you owe that companies care about – not your life.
@ Eileen –
Noooo!!!
The electric company is *never* the “backup plan”!!
The backup plan is to have access to what you need to survive, not contingent upon the electric company, or the government, or the kindness of strangers.
What if NZ had one of the US Northeast’s 3 day blackouts? Or even a nice brief 2-hour rolling blackout? Or the power company respected her right to survive, gave her free electricity, & the transformer outside her house was struck by lightning??
If you can’t afford $1000 for a battery backup, then make damn sure that you call an ambulance or a neighbor the minute your lights go out. Hospitals are a good temporary fallback plan, since it’s ostensibly their job to keep people alive…
but you can’t even rely on them too much.
Neighbors are the best backup plan, as long as they know you’d do the same for them.
The answer to everyones’s questions is easy; The woman is a pacific islander, she has brown skin and her people were only ever allowed into the country to clean our offices and toilets in the middle of the night because Maori people were getting too stroppy.
She is the bottom of our particular heap and of no consequence.
(In case it’s not obvious, I’m giving voice to the feelings of people in this country with this statement – not to my own feelings)
Who cares? It’s just a dumb islander. Cut all their power off.
Besides, if they thought it was life and death they could have run a lead next door. They obviously were surprises by the death too, so they can’t say it was obvious she would die. They then said they didn’t ask for help because they didn’t want to make a fuss- but they are certainly making a fu$$ now!
Old white people die all the time, but only islanders moan and complain like this.
People need to realise what is happening in NZ. The welfare mentality is making slaves of white people, working for other races that do not ever appreciate what life would be like without us.
I’m sick of it. If she was in Samoa, she would have died long ago probably.
Send them all back or NZ is doomed to become another commie shit hole like Brazil or South Africa.
And to anyone who says I’m racist: so what? I’m right aren’t I? Islanders are not rocket scientists, and never will be. They choose to do menial jobs, because they don’t have the intellectual capacity to beat whites and asians at the thinking game. They are basically blaming the death on white people, as if the tablets from Mt Sinai had an 11th commandment that says “If thou is white, then thou must look after everyone, no matter how useless they are”
Stop trying to make us feel guilty. How many islanders donate blood? How many islanders donate money to white people’s causes? How many blacks sponsor starving white kids? How many Samoan volunteer firemen are there?
Have a look at those stats and learn!