Elderly man freezes to death in his own home because of $1,000
A 93-year-old WW II veteran was found dead in his home, from hypothermia, after the electric company put limiters on his heat. The temperature inside his house was 32 degrees and the water in his sink was frozen. Good Morning America reported that the man, Marvin Shur, owed over $1,000 to the utility company. My question: is $1,000 worth his slow and painful death? And does the utility company have some accountability to bear here?
Bay City Electric Light & Power is the first to point out that they didn’t do anything illegal; but what is their moral responsibility? As a utility company they have a lot of power (no pun intended) over the people they serve. Should there be safeguards in place to ensure that the elderly are taken care of? Are there no checks and balances in place to ensure the safety of their customers? It’s just unacceptable to me that they shut off the heat while a 93-year-old man was living there. I am not sure what their recourse should have been — but it’s not like the utility company doesn’t make enough money to look out for the people in the community in which they serve. I am not saying this man had the right to live free of charge, but couldn’t the power company have been more aware of the consequences of their actions?
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There is a federal program called HEAP that helps the elderly pay their heating bills. Most power companies offer payment plans to the customers who can’t meet their bills, to avoid just such a situation. The problem with all this help is that the customer has to apply for it. It is possible that a 93-year-old man was brought up to be ashamed of needing help, in which case he would literally prefer death to the humiliation of admitting that he could not take care of himself. Those were the values of his generation. His death is tragic, but neither the government nor the power company can be held accountable for the consequences of somebody’s personal choice to eschew help they’ve made available. Power companies handle these things automatically; everything is computerized; and his age is unlikely to have even been in their database if he wasn’t a HEAP client. If he didn’t communicate with them, they may have marked his house as abandoned.
If he didn’t have family to make sure he was OK, the power company does not step up to the plate to assume that responsibility.
(If Caseworker Alice Pitney marched into his unheated house and forced him to fill out all the appropriate applications regardless of his feelings in the matter, he might have been alive and saved from himself despite himself.)
Damn that Alice Pitney! Where is she when you need her.
The GMA piece also mentions that he might have had dementia… if that’s the case then it’s possible he wouldn’t have been able to make a logical choice – or even understood what HEAP was all about. Either way — it’s awful that he went out the way he did.
In this day and age they have computer programs for everything, there is no way they couldn’t have found out how old he was and that is against the law to shut off the elderly when it is that cold!!
And Bellemer quit trying to put the blame on the neighbors. Where is the responsibility of the utility company for not knowing the age of this man?? Omg you have records for everything and as long as this man lived there there is no way they didn’t know something could have been wrong when all other bills were up to date to a certain point in his life. Did anyone stop to think that at his age there could have been a health issue that made him not pay the bill??? We need a little humanity back in the utility companies instead of all the computerized thinking. Maybe he would still be here.
This is just deplorable. This just solidifies the fact that we treat our elderly and young worse than any country in the world!!!
Cynthia, what world are you talking about? This one? Have you seen some of what goes on with the elderly and especially the young around the world? You shouldn’t call something a “fact” that is obviously a wildly exaggerated opinion. Putting three exclamation points at the end doesn’t make it a fact.
Redwingsrule: a power company is not a social services agency. There is a federal program (administered by social workers), and power companies have programs in place for clients who fall behind on their bills to avoid getting their utilities shut off. Your assertion seems to be that since there are computer programs for everything, everybody is legally obligated to use all of them for everything and know everything about everyone at all times, automatically.
If utilities companies had to keep people on staff to look into changes in behavioral patterns of their clients who don’t communicate with them, and make house calls to ensure the customers are OK . . . what planet are you from, again?
Freezing to death is prevented by filling out an application. Death of an old man with dementia and no family to take care of him is a tragedy, but the power company is not a villain in it. Some tragedies have no villains.
The death of this 93 yo man by freezing to death in his own home has me angered me beyond belief. For one thing, if any no good person would set out to cut the power deliberately on anybody’s home with an impending winter storm on it’s way resulting in death, this would be considered a malicious act with intent to kill and thereby would hit the courts with a manslaughter charge. I do hold the power company responsible for the death of this WWII veteran, and I think that everyone who was responsible for installing this power saving device and not educating him on the use of it – should be held accountable and charged accordingly in his death. It sickens me that we that we have become so justified and politically correct in our actions – that people continue to fail to do the right thing! Oh, and with these new fangle phones – when you cut the power – you also cut off the old fella’s way to call for outside help.