Apparently 3 months worth of utilities

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090126/ap_on_re_us/frozen_indoors
93-year-old froze to death, owed big utility bill


Mon Jan 26, 3:32 pm ET

BAY CITY, Mich. – 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.

"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."

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, Belleman said. 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.

Schur's 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 newspaper.

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.

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Man, at some point you'd think to start a fire... Guy was probably ready to go. He's old enough to know how to get by.

Here you're not allowed to shut off the power in the winter.

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Around here they can't shut off the power or gas in the winter. They have to wait until April I think.

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Man, that's a sign of the times--when I first joined this forum I was fitting my office building out a suite at a time to be 'ready to roll' office space, with high tech phone system/answering service, cat 5 in every room, furniture, copier, untilities included ect.....but I had one holdover tenant who was an old guy that I liked that wanted to keep his stuff for another year the way it had been. He was downstairs and long story short, an upstairs pipe broke and flooded his office, wrecking about 40 boxes of oil leases. We filed a claim and got to work. While he was out during the remediation, he had a stroke and I never saw him again (he died a few months later). When the carpet was replaced and the rest of the water damage repaired, I used his office for meetings, storage, parties, ect.....and sort of got slack on outfitting it like the others. The power company finally called my partner and the electric bill on that unit had not been paid for five months, and they never cut it off!! The bill was the only one not in his name, and I never caught it.

$1K seems kind of light to cut someone off in the winter, but they have to buy fuel to make electricity. Sad. Make it to 93 and then out like that.

Betcha the guy that installed the "Limiter" is going to feel like crap for a good long while.

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Unless I misread, the guy had no children and his wife was dead and if he had the means to maintain $5M worth of term life insurance or otherwise had that kind of liquidity, there wouldn't have been an issue keeping the power on @$300/month.

The Eskimos put their old people out on the ice to die. Maybe the people at the electric company were Eskimos . . . .

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I wonder what changed to cause him to run up a $1000 utility bill. I can't imagine his mental state to be crystal clear at 93 either.

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I live in the deep south and have racked up a $1K/month home utility bill during the summer before.

I'd have died of a heart attack if I got a $1000 utility bill.

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" We have nothing to fear but the main stream media itself . . . ."- Adapted from Franklin D Roosevelt for the 21st century

OBK #55

1998 Lincoln Continental - Sold
Max 1984 300TD 285,000 miles - Sold
The Dee8gonator 1987 560SEC 196,000 miles - Sold
Orgasmatron - 2006 CLS500 90,000 miles
2002 C320 Wagon 122,000 miles
2016 AMG GTS 12,000 miles

In Michigan you could easily hit that in two or three months, my gas and electric was $750-1000 last month.

Utility companies rule the show in Michigan its one of the biggest rip offs in the nation, its such a rip off that they were going to loan the state money to cover a deficit in exchange for repealing an enacted voter proposition; this was not behind closed dorrs either they actually went to the news with it.

just an example of the arrogance of the F-ers.

I'd have died of something likely more painful if I would have told my pregnant, half coonass wife she didn't need 10(9?) tons of AC blasting when it was only about 80 outside

This isn't the service you attended, is it?