** Please consider contributing to Krystal’s GoFundMe associated with this story**
Although we’re generally not direct service providers at EEP, from my 11 years work at EcoWorks, a Detroit non-profit, I learned when people reach out, you respond.
Last week we presented on our Energy Bill Transparency Initiative at a ratepayer clinic organized by Michigan Environmental Justice Coalition and the West Grand Boulevard Collective. Just before it started, a woman who had been planning to attend reached out by email to say she was going into labor and needed to get her power back on ASAP. At first, I figured we would just be referring her to one of our partners, but it turned out we had more capacity to help in the moment. Krystal called to explain her situation—she really needed the power back on to go home from the hospital with her baby and 7-year-old son. How could we help?
It was time to directly engage in a system I had long been documenting and fighting against at a distance. The system, I immediately experienced, is absurd, arranged only to punish, not to help.
Krystal had been working at Chrysler until late summer when she was laid off and received no severance. She fell behind on multiple bills and had her power shut off by DTE a week before giving birth. She should have qualified for a medical exemption, because she has COPD and both she and her son need oxygen every day. Initially she was told by DTE she wouldn’t receive the exemption because she uses bottled oxygen and doesn’t need power for that. A doctor who completed her form noted her need for uninterrupted power for a nebulizer, but the exemption was rejected because she had left a couple of redundant fields on the 4-page form blank.
In the end I made five calls to DTE and never received the same information twice. The runaround might have been comical if the consequences weren’t so severe.
Multiple times the rep said the exemption only applied if it had been filed before the shutoff, but could not be used to restore power. Liz Jacob, attorney at Sugar Law Center, sent me the Michigan statute that refutes this and confirms medical exemptions do apply to restorations. Others told me to have Krystal submit a second form, but didn’t say why she needed to do that. With a one-day old, I didn’t want to bug her about paperwork if it wasn’t necessary, but ultimately she resubmitted anyway. Another rep gave me a local phone number to the DTE department that processed medical exemptions, but that number connected me to a random resident with no connection to DTE. I don’t blame the call center reps for struggling to navigate the morass of regulations around shutoff protections with 10+ pages of scripts from DTE.
Finally on the fifth call, a rep reviewed both of her exemptions and told me they had been rejected—one because she had signed electronically and another because there was a signature missing on a different page. By this point, Krystal was about to be discharged and needed to get home. Redoing the form wasn’t going to resolve the issue in time, and there was a risk she would be powerless through the weekend if we didn’t get it restored that afternoon. So we had to pay a portion of the balance to get service temporarily restored—for at least 10 days I was told but wasn’t given a clear end date.
Krystal got home with her power back on, fortunately, but the problem still looms. She is still scraping by to afford other basic needs and baby supplies. Her unemployment still has not been processed and all she can do is wait until more resources become available.
Like most of you reading this, I have the privilege of sleeping at night without worrying about whether a for-profit company is going to shut off my power because I can’t pay the bill. And after paying my bill, I still have money so I don’t have to skimp on food, delay a refill at the pharmacy, or walk home over an hour from the pharmacy on a hot afternoon with a newborn in my arms because I couldn’t afford an Uber, as Krystal did.
I’m organizing some mutual aid among friends to help Krystal get back on her feet (here is her GoFundMe). And as much as I’m moved by Krystal’s resilience and her constant gratitude, seeing what she is going through has brought on waves of despair. My daughter was born last June, and imagining those first few days without power for cooling, cooking, laundry, or hot water gives me shivers.
After her mom passed and losing her daughter to cancer, Krystal was holding it together as a single mom with a full-time job–working to manage her and her son’s respiratory disabilities. In an instant, she was knocked from the thin stability she had. Like so many Americans, she doesn’t have a cushion to weather a crisis like unemployment. Those of us who have a safety net to lean on generally got it because the system favored us, allowing us to accrue more while others repeatedly see their own fragile buffers evaporate.
Krystal still needs to go through another round of applications for assistance and to try to get both her unemployment and medical exemption finally processed. It is a dehumanizing gauntlet, replete with dead ends and misinformation. She has been reluctant to ask for anything more than she needs and only sheepishly accepts the idea of receiving mutual aid, having been self-sufficient through a steady stream of battles for so long. Nonetheless, I’m hopeful that, even with great difficulty and sleepless nights, Krystal will see brighter days. She is holding on with incredible fortitude, fighting through broken systems and connecting with people who can help navigate them.
But it is all too easy to think of the many Krystals who do not make it through ok. The doctor who was filling out her medical exemption could have required proof that her power was back on and notified child protective services if not. Krystal could have had her baby taken away. Or come home to a refrigerator full of molded food (which she did) and been at a loss as to how to feed her family. Before we had service restored, Krystal was struggling to breathe, not knowing where she would go after being discharged, with the women’s shelters generally full.
I had previously written that “Shutoffs rain like stones thrown blindly from an overpass.” Perhaps for Krystal I was able to shield a single stone; nationally, we estimate 7 million power shutoffs every year.
There are no less than 8 different types of shutoff protections utilities use, and many utilities offer none. They cover periods of heat and cold, the elderly, and veterans; none that I am aware of offer protections for pregnancy or young children. All of these protections have two things in common. First, they are mere sieves, with massive gaps that people in crisis routinely slip through, resulting in very serious consequences. Second, they belie the financial largesse of the shutoff executioners–the investor-owned utilities (IOUs). It would take less than 2% of the dividends these utilities pay their shareholders to forgive all of their customers’ debt. Yet instead, they choose to exploit their customers, especially from majority Black and Brown communities like Detroit. They raise rates to levels that many cannot hope to pay and then penalize them with late fees, demand additional deposits of several hundred dollars, and ultimately cut their power anyway when they inevitably fall behind. They pull in $50 billion more in profit than they need to operate. 7 million families like Krystal’s pay the price.
There is no such thing as a safe or acceptable shutoff. So yes, let’s shield the stones that are being hurled down within arms reach. But ultimately, we hope Krystal’s story throws the injustices of our current system into sharp relief and catalyzes people to push for complete shutoff abolition, an impenetrable shield that leaves no one behind and no one at risk. Anything less is a false solution.
Resources
Shutoffs primer
Powerless in the pandemic series 1, 2, and 3
No shutoffs coalition
EEP Another World is Possible blog post and related posts