1. Right....once he lost power...with the avg temps being as cold, he was going to quickly freeze to death

2. The point of his passing naturally...you hit the nail on the head. Most older folks tend to have a decrease in their overall body temps and sometimes can't tell how cold it is and sometimes can't even call for help...

All things considered, even if we can say that he did feel how cold it was, AND CONSIDERING that he was behind on the bill, I am willing ot bet he probably dind't have access to a phone either.

If we can stop mucking over the limiter, we can move onto the social aspect of it all which is more important right now...the gent probably didn't have a dependable social network to help him in this time of need.

90 something years old...he needed someone to make the calls for him or visit the places which could have helped him. He needed assistance of someone to also do whatever paperwork that probably is required to get the waiver needed to keep his power on.

let's look at it folks, $1000 is a lot of money to ask a 93 year old to play for power and I am willing to bet the farm that as more details come out, he had nowhere near that kind of income to cover.

PM...question...in the past few years, have you all experienced a rate hike in the gas and eletrcity in your area and by how much?

Maryland has experienced an increase by almost 50%....people damn near rioted.

Point is sweetie, there was enough info in the article to fairly lead you to a conclusion as to how it worked...but I don't think the limiter alone was the whole point.

That is where you are letting yourself get stuck...step away from that.

Kind of a digression from the thread or even your point, but it seems like out culture has gotten away from the idea that it's the obligation of children to care for their parents. It seems like it's kind of acceptable to strip your parents assets if it means that you can then have state programs take care of them.

I suspect that we can all think of people we know who when their parents care level hit a certain point, they basically decided that the best call was to sell stuff off or transfer possession so the parent could then qualify for more state help.

I'm not saying it's completely typically, but I think it's at least as common as the examples we can think of in which a family took an elderly relative into their home and cared for the person until death.

Right now I'm too lazy to go back and look but I think someone said that he didn't have kids, and being 94 he probably didn't have any living family left.

If I don't have kids, my brother better have a lot of kids so I have nieces and nephews to take care of me.

Not that I'm thinking I'm going to make it much past 60.

To the OP: It is unfortunate the the 93 y/o man was so alienated that he did not have the wherewithal to either have his heating bills paid or some kind determination made.

After visiting Hospice today, and personal knowledge of Nursing care facilities and care facilities, my parents decision to not choose that option is good to know.

Some of us all have anecdotal stories of close loved ones, but to some level, there can be resolution with an elder.

Actually what you are saying here is not a digression but is the heart of the entire topic.

There are many elderly or indigent folks who have no resources to get to and thus we wind up have stories such as this one.

We may be outraged, or saddened by these events, but where should we place the blame?

This won't be the last time we hear of this type of story.

Referring to number 2: I meant died of natural causes before the heat went out. This way he already would have been dead before he would have frozen to death.

Michigan has experienced a hike. I'm not sure how much but with times being so tough around here, it seems like a large hike. We've been keeping our heat at 73 and it's freezing in here. We normally keep it at 74 and that 1 degree really does make a difference. My house is big and open and you'd think it'd be easier to heat the house but it's not.

If this man didn't have family at all, what resolution could have been made? Neighbors can only do so much, especially if they weren't friendly with him.

My local utility company is really small town in operations, but has a lot of programs so this doesn't happen. Allegedly they won't shut off power in the winter (last night is was below 0), but I'm not sure if it is a state law or just their policy.

https://www.avistautilities.com/comm...s/default.aspx

I like that they also provide translators, and don't limit information to just energy. I'll round my bill up a bit and donate to their "project share", and when they did the CFL rebates I donated all the money back.

What about electric heaters? Would that help at all?

We have one in our "sunroom". The extra windows and skylights make the room 10x colder than the rest of our house. The space heater slightly helps but you have to REALLY be careful with those. Way too many house fires caused by them.

I think that most people still see it as their responsibility to care for their parents. However, it is much more common to live further away from your family as well. "Back in the day" people didn't move far away from their home towns so they had frequent contact. Now, a lot of retired parents move out of state and children don't usually stay in the area where they grew up because of lack of opportunities. My dad moved to Florida and my brother moved to Alabama and I am stranded here in the frozen wasteland of Michigan while they enjoy their mild winters in the South. Oops, didn't mean to vent my resentment here :) But yeah, they abandoned me for the mild winters and year round golfing <sigh>

I do think, in general, that we do not honor and respect our elderly as they do in many cultures. We see getting old as a bad thing and don't listen to the wisdom of the elderly, forgetting that they've already lived through everything that we're trying to cope with in our own lives. However, every single person I know tries their hardest to care for their parents. I know that when I was caring for my mom in her last months with us, I did have the thought that I was role modeling for my own kids how to treat *their* mother! That's all a moot point with this guy because he didn't have any immediate family left. It definitely is an argument for having kids!

There is an old saying "Be nice to your children. They are the ones who will be picking out your nursing home."

I don't know what society's responsibility is in a case like this. It seems like, in January in Michigan, the electric company could wait a few months before shutting off the electricity OR get the person set up with assistance. It would be to their benefit to get them set up with assistance because then they would get the bill paid. It's even possible that the poor guy didn't have the cognition to pay his bills or something. Meaning, he may have had the money but didn't remember that he didn't pay, didn't have stamps.. who knows?

ETA yet again because y'all keep posting while I'm typing: Yes, we have had big price increases. In fact, the company that this guy had just announced another rate increase today. Our heat is actually gas up here, for most people in cities. In rural areas, they may have propane or heating oil, but most is natural gas heat. The blowers for the furnace are electric though. So, no electricity= no heat, even though it's gas heat. I keep my house at 64 at night/when we're at work/school and 68 during waking hours that we're home. I have a fire in the fireplace if it's too cold. We wear sweatshirts and slippers and use blankets (not Snugglies!) around the house. When you're moving around, it's fine at 68. It's when you're sitting around watching TV that it gets chilly. We have electric blankets at night. My gas bills for this winter have been running about $300 a month, electric around $95. I'm on a budget plan though. They average my last year's usage costs into one monthly payment so it is the same all year. In November, they true up and either I owe them a lot or they owe me some. We really really scrimp on electricity and heat in October so that we don't owe! My budget plan this year is $186 a month for gas and electric together. To rack up $1000 electric bill really does take some time. I rarely use my family room in the winter. Because it's an addition, it's on a cement slab and it has 3 outside walls with French doors and a huge bay window. It's the coldest room in the house all winter.. probably 10 degrees cooler than the living room! It stinks.

Maybe your house is better insulated than mine, but I'm blown away that you keep it about 70. We're set to be about 68 in winter in Georgia, so I can't imagine what you'd pay to keep it 73 in Michigan.

Even if you aren't friendly with him, if you have a 90+ neighbor, I'm going to say it's your civic duty to check on him if it's that freezing cold. It might be your moral duty to check in on him daily, but that's probably between your moral code and you.

I'm trying to really put myself in their shoes and I can see why you'd wait. I think what I'd really do is try to set up a rotation of checking with my other neighbors so it wasn't super awkward.

Ummmm because 68 here is a beautiful fall or spring day!

I keep my house at 45. The heat kicks on to let it get no colder than that. I am fully clothed at home, have a blanket (not the slanket or the snuggie though ;) ) and I have one space heater that I can set to maintain a certain temp (I set it at 55 so I can sleep, any higher than that I get too hot). I don't have central air, just these dumb space heater type things for each room, though there is one that runs next to the exterior pipes for the kitchen. It really doesn't bother me too much, but yeah, the temp in my house has been in the mid to upper 40's. I also have a second space heater I will turn on in my office only when I am in there working, and I turn all the power strips off when I leave.

Oh and it is in the Idaho Administrative Code that power can't be turned off December through February to those who declare there are children, elderly, or infirm residents, and they have payment plans set up http://adm.idaho.gov/adminrules/rules/idapa31/2101.pdf My roommate moved out and the power dropped $50 and it has been colder.

Speaking for the entire south, we'd love to have you too. We have health care industries and Alpha Gamma Delta chapters. Just saying.

It seems like we can all say we have a responsibility in these cases. It's just hard to figure out how to deliver the services people need or even figuring out what they need if they feel that they don't want to ask or don't know who to ask.

As far as my own family, there's been a history of caring for people and assisting them in their homes until they eventually basically got sick enough to go in the hospital and not come out. But as you said, all these cases were in the same town.

Maybe I was being too hard on people earlier. Maybe it's just the times I've heard of people wanting to put their parents in a medicaid supported home, it made such an impression.

Right, but I mean in my house in the winter, we keep it at 68. It might be 30 outside. And you are in the cold, cold winter and your heating to 73. It's just blows my mind, but again, your home is probably better insulated.

Um, the 40s inside is too cold for me, but celebrate your small carbon footprint!

And as I said earlier, I'm not sure that just straight no cut off represents the best policy, but if it's the only way to keep people from freezing to death inside, maybe that's what you have to do.

Does anyone else run stuff like this through your little house on the prairie mental filter? If the freaking pioneers could live without electricity at all or gas heat in freaking Nebraska or whatever, why do we now think we need free heat to live?

(and sure we don't all have fireplaces and wood stoves today, but I don't think they had them fired up 24 hours a day and they still survived.)

We'd still come back to a 93 year old guy living alone and he'd had a hard time at any point, but we've all gone soft and we're stupidly dependent of stuff we don't actually provide for ourselves.

There's that.. and the fact that I'm hopelessly in love with a man with lives in Smyrna and have been since 2000. I'm just hoping he's still single in 5 years when my youngest goes away to college :D

My mom was really adamant that she would not live with me under any circumstances. She was also at a point that she couldn't have been maintained medically at home. She needed more nursing care than could be provided reasonably. Her big fear was that my kids would find her when she passed and she didn't want them to go through that. She passed before we had to make a final decision. The nursing home we had picked out though was 1/4 mile from my house so I intended to be there every day and the kids were planning on walking over there after school to see grandma sometimes too. I think some of what we're seeing is simply because people are living longer and longer. Women are working outside the home so even if they moved their parent into their home, they wouldn't be supervised. Alzheimer's patients get to a point where they cannot be maintained in a family home because they can wander off while the family is sleeping, etc. I don't think we can judge people for those kinds of decisions. I DO think it's horrendous to put someone there and never go to see them.

In the case of this guy, there wasn't even anybody to move him into a safer environment. It truly is sad.

Well I've mentioned on GC before I'm a perfect example of Bergmann's rule, I think I just handle cold better. I walked to and from school yesterday and people were whining about the weather, and I thought it was gorgeous, I even got so warm I had to unzip my coat. Today there were more whiners (8am class) and I felt fine. My whole trip to Vegas I was miserably hot, and I don't think it got above 65. I keep my extremities covered though, as I am not interested in frostbite.

For some reason, 68 in the summer vs 68 in the winter are two completely different temperatures. I think the thing is that, especially in big houses, it may be 73 by the thermostat but NOT in the bedrooms and ESPECIALLY not in the basement. Tile and wood floors are also very cold. Plus...in GA, the winter temp is in the 50s or so, right? Maybe 40s, but rarely lower? We routinely get to the negative degrees, especially with wind chill.

Bedrooms can be 5 degrees below the rest of the house in temperature, too.

Vandal: How do your pipes not freeze???

Because freezing is at 32 degrees and my pipes are all interior except those to the kitchen sink/dishwasher. Those pipes come directly from the garage which is built into a hillside and well insulated. I also leave the cabinet doors open, and the heater comes on at 45. I'm not home a lot, no point in heating the house when I'm not home. I can see my breath at about 43, which is why I set it at 45.

have you tried leaving your faucets on at a slow drip?

supposedly, by doing that, you can avoid pipe freeze.

It's not that limited, if you think about it. The elderly, ill, people with kids, and those who need power to treat chronic illnesses (that could be as basic as asthma or diabetes, if a case is severe enough) are the most vulnerable. That pretty much eliminates everyone except for able-bodied young and middle-aged people without children in the home. Those people should be able to pay their own power bill.

It seems to work well here in NYC, since people don't freeze to death all winter long. :)

As far as "the pioneer days" and people not having electricity then, we also live in areas of the world that weren't exactly habitable before the advent of electricity and the automobile. Also, one of the interesting advances of science is medications sometimes have to be refrigerated. We can't pretend that we can do without the things people did 150 years ago because times have changed.

One of my previous homes had the bathroom pipes along a southwest exterior wall. Someone told me to buy Heat Tape to wrap the pipes. Luckily, there was a trap door to the pipes in one of the bedrooms, so it was doable.

This worked until it was maybe 15 degrees, then I resorted to the "slow-drip" process. I also found that an blow dryer could unfreeze a pipe pretty quickly if you knew where it was frozen.

As for bedrooms being 5 degrees colder, not in my house. My bedrooms are upstairs and heat rises. At night, the thermostat is set on 60. Otherwise, I think I'm getting hot flashes.

No need to, my pipes don't freeze. Plus I couldn't live with myself if I wasted water like that.

Yeah, I have issues regarding the environment, but I also thought it was beautiful today and it didn't get above freezing. Had on my sunglasses and enjoyed the sunshine.

There's actually a lot of variety in terms of winter temps in Georgia. Daytime might be 50s in the Atlanta area with nights in the thirties. In the North Georgia mountains they have a pretty real winter (by most people's standards, I think) with lows below freezing 90-100 days a year according to this site: http://www.srh.noaa.gov/ffc/html/clisumlst.shtml. Further south, it's certainly more moderate until we're practically Florida.

I'm not trying to suggest we're experiencing the temperatures that other people do. I'm just amazed thinking about what it would cost to keep my house at 73.

People lived in some pretty cold places before electricity was taken for granted, but I'm not suggesting we should go back. I'm pretty grateful for air conditioning in the summer, especially. I just think it's odd how relatively quickly we've come to accept an entitlement to electric power.

I think utilities are something that ought to be a high priority for people to pay for themselves. The number of people who actually can't pay is probably pretty low, but if we make too long a list of people who get power whether they pay for it our not, I think we're going to see a lot fewer people on the list making paying for utilities a priority.

But I'm certainly not saying that we cut power off and let people freeze to death. I just think there may be other effective ways to handle the issue.

I suspect that heat in general is less of an issue in NYC because of shared building heat among apartments. If you are on a floor fairly high up in a building, you might not even need much of your own. So, if power bills are pretty cheap, there probably are not a lot of people who are trying to justify to themselves not paying for it.

You just want to be careful what you indirectly invite with public policy.

It depends on where you live as to why you'd let the water drip at night. In a slow drip, it's just that, turn on the faucets enough so that the water just drips. We do it in the winter, even though it's Texas. People don't think that it will freeze down here, but it does. I've got mine dripping right now in the kitchen and one of the bathrooms and in the outside faucet.
If you have PVC piping, the water will freeze and bust the pipes. It's a horrible mess. We had it happen many, many, many times in my Mom's trailer house. It gets to be annoying as hell! In my house (which was my Grandparents) my Granddaddy installed everything with copper piping, but I just don't want to take the risk of having something burst underneath the house.
I only keep the water dripping in the places that I use the most (my bathroom and the kitchen). But then again, I don't have central air and heat, I use window units, propane gas, and the wood stove to keep warm.
It is easy to freeze to death in a home if the person has no heat. I was surprised that the county didn't offer him some type of program assistance, which is usual in most counties to help avoid this.

The guy lived 93 years. His time was up. It is a non story.




I am glad when we have a good cold spell to clean the bums out of the park.

I guess that means if I am a racist (which you called me)then you are an age-ist.

One day you will wake up and you may be 73 years old and freezing to death, I wonder if your mind will change then about what you said....heh.

No. That is the difference between us. You will probably be sitting around your crib in da hood waiting for Obama to turn on your electric while I am out working to pay my bills and yours.


holla

Go fuck yourself you ignorant @ss bastid.

"holla"


Funny thing about the hood....lil jack@sses like you wouldn't last.

You would be running back to mama and daddy first chance you get 'cuz 'they' look at you funny.

What's going to happen in all those places who are without power, and are expected to be without power for some time, due to the storm??

I know that many communities have emergency plans in place, and those who cannot survive that situation are brought to temporary/emergency shelters (high school gyms, church basements, so on).

This is why I well never leave the south, I hate being cold. I keep my apt about 70 during the day and 74 at night. I just visited a friend in Durango Co and she had the thermostat set in the 50's-I was so uncomfortable i could barely sleep. If it is less than 40 degrees outside I will not go out (unless i gotta go to work).

The truth of the matter is, aggie, your body does experience physiological changes that help you deal with the cold. At the beginning of winter, 25 degrees feels really cold. By this time of winter, 25 feels balmy outside because we've adjusted to temps between 0-15. Besides that, we dress for the cold. We wear layers and coats and gloves and hats. Most of us would have a hard time sleeping if it was in the 50's in our homes, trust me! We don't spend a lot of time outside in the winter. However, I can honestly say that if the outside temp is over 85, I find it extremely uncomfortable and don't want to be outside at those times either!

One of my best friends from high school moved to Texas for several years. She said "It's not that different from living in Michigan. In Michigan, we don't go outside much for about 3 months due to cold. In Texas, we don't go outside much for about 3 months due to the 100 degree heat. The difference is, during those three months in Michigan, the kids are in school. In Texas, it's summer and the kids are stir crazy in the house!" She's back in Michigan now!

Did anyone hear that his family finally surfaced, and are angry at the utility company? One of his nephews is all, "we hadn't spoken in a year." :rolleyes: He also observed that his uncle had his bill envelopes filled with the correct amount of cash for each bill.

Some excerpts in an updated article:

One of the saddest things of all was that Schur appeared to have plenty of money, and, in fact, one of the neighbours who entered the home reported seeing cash clipped to a pile of bills on the kitchen table. Schur's nephew suggested the old man's mind may have been slipping.


City Electric Light & Power did not contact Schur face-to-face to notify him of the device and explain how it works, instead following its usual policy by leaving a note on the door. But neighbours said Schur rarely, if ever, left the house in the cold.



The medical examiner is looking into whether Schur suffered from dementia, particularly after police found enough cash lying around in the home to cover his bills. His nephew William Walworth said Schur told him two years ago he had $600,000 in savings.



Michigan's big, state-regulated utilities are not allowed to shut off power to senior citizens in the winter and must offer payment plans to the poor. State regulators also discourage the use of limiters. But Michigan's 41 smaller municipal utilities - Bay City's included - are not overseen by the state.

Link

Yeah but it sounds like if the man had enough cash to pay the bills, a neighbor or family member should have been there making sure they get paid.

For crying out loud, I'm constantly making sure my and live-in's bills are paid, and my dad has spent a month in Florida so my brother took over his bills for this month to make sure they get paid, too (they live in the same town).

My dad paid my grandmother's bills long before she ever went senile. In fact, when her mind went, my aunt moved in with her so that she would take care of her and pay the bills.

I guess what I'm not getting is how hard is it to pay a guy's bills every month, especially when you're using their money?

The reality is most people in society can make it in the hood and some of them even came from the hood. It is the people in your hood that can't make it in society, where you have to work, and be responsible. In your neighborhood most people don't even take care of their own kids.