Ameren's Peculiar Definition of Victimhood

In testimony before the Missouri Public Service Commission yesterday, representatives of Ameren called the company a "victim" in the spate of St. Louis area power outages that followed a late-November ice and snow storm. I do not think the word "victim" means what Ameren thinks it does. 

The AP's David Lieb wrote up Ameren's visit to the PSC:

A top Ameren Corp. official described the utility as a "victim" of storm damage to trees Wednesday, as Missouri regulators examined why hundreds of thousands of customers lost power after storms. ...

"We are really a victim of the storm damage to trees," Zdellar told reporters during a break in Wednesday's PSC session. "Ameren doesn't own any of these trees, (and) we didn't plant any of them."

(One wonders whether Ameren lobbyist Andy Blunt advised his client to pursue the "victim" tack.)

Ameren, the spokespeople themselves submit, is a "victim" by virtue of the fact that it cannot cut certain trees in proximity to its lines. Boo-hoo. If that qualifies someone as a victim, how might Ameren describe the individual in the following scenario? 

Authorities in St. Louis said the power outage contributed to the death of a man whose body was found Monday in his cold, unlighted home in the city's Baden neighborhood.

Health officials said the man, 61, who lived on Logan Street just west of Hall Street, had been without power since the storm struck last week. His name was not released. 

And that man was one of at least ten who died deaths attributable to the power outage.

Perhaps Ameren can try again to find a different term with which to describe its relation to the recent outages. A continued effort by Ameren to use its own piddling problems to put itself on the same level as the real victims of the storm and outages (the people who, you know, died and their families) is nothing short of ghoulish. For shame.