Saturday, March 29, 2008

Walking to the bank


Take a spill on one of Flint's sidewalks and you can expect a decent payout from the city, according to Joe Lawlor of The Flint Journal:

City of Flint payouts for defective sidewalk claims


1999: $359,543
2000: $18,000
2001: $242,500
2002: $74,500
2003: $170,300
2004: $147,000
2005: $59,500
2006: $89,157
2007: $138,500
2008 (year-to-date): $15,000

Just don't assume you can just stroll into a local hospital to get medical care if you need it after the fall:

The county's three hospitals have been closed to incoming ambulances for more than 384 hours combined since Feb. 1, according to Genesee County Medical Control Authority statistics.

Hurley Medical Center and McLaren Regional Medical Center both shut their doors to ambulances early last week due to a packed ER.

And for about 2 1/2 hours last week, all three hospitals were reported closed to incoming ambulances -- at which point patients were transported to the nearest hospital available, despite overflowing ERs.




4 comments:

  1. You can no longer say the lower rate of homicides is due to the improved medical care...

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  2. Excellent point! Yet more evidence for my theory that cold, crappy weather leads to safer cities.

    (Not sure why I've started using so many exclamation points since I started blogging!)

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  3. My dad fell off a high step with no handrail at Southwestern and broke his leg. He told the school system that they didn't have to pay him a dime if they just fixed the step and put in a handrail. They never did...he got paid.

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  4. If it makes you feel any better, San Francisco is just as bad. The city is broke and the streets are a mess. They start projects, then abandon them, and return to finish them months later. The potholes rival any city in the country. And this is a place that has a lot of people with a lot of money.

    ReplyDelete

Thanks for commenting. I moderate comments, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. You might enjoy my book about Flint called "Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City," a Michigan Notable Book for 2014 and a finalist for the 33rd Annual Northern California Book Award for Creative NonFiction. Filmmaker Michael Moore described Teardown as "a brilliant chronicle of the Mad Maxization of a once-great American city." More information about Teardown is available at www.teardownbook.com.