Man Freezes to Death After City Limits Electricity
January 27th, 2009Via: AP:
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.
Marvin E. Schur died “a slow, painful death,” said Kanu Virani, Oakland County’s deputy chief medical examiner, who performed the autopsy.
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.
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“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.
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.
The limiter was tripped sometime between the time of installation and the discovery of Schur’s body, Belleman said. 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.
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.”
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.
It’s hard not to suspect the famous incrementalism at work again. The key points here: no family to become outraged, very elderly anyway, not “taking responsibility” for his bills. Here is an example of denying someone a necessity of life and hiding behind a bureaucracy all the while making a crime like this more palatable because of this man’s marginal existence. Because he was at the end of his life anyway most people will not register with the idea that this is how bad things become acceptable, by first being OK ot do to those on the fringes of society. Same with RFID tags. Put ’em on pets, then criminals, then Alzheimer’s patients (for their own protection mind you), then your children, and then you!
Of course another interpretation of this story could be that little by little they are warning us, we are on our own (in case Katrina didn’t make that clear). Make what preparations you can to ride out hard times.