Detroit Residents Stay In at Night as Lights Go Out

Michigan Governor Rick Snyder on Thursday announced a state takeover of Detroit’s finances and appointed as manager a corporate bankruptcy expert who took a can-do attitude toward turning around the destitute city, calling it the “Olympics of restructuring.” Kevyn Orr, an attorney who worked on the restructuring of Michigan-based automaker Chrysler, said as the city’s emergency financial manager he hoped to avoid a bankruptcy filing by Detroit, something that would rank as the biggest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history.

Crews at Detroit’s Engine 54 station chase fires on trucks with broken gas gauges, faulty air brakes and, in one, an odometer that reads 183,000 miles. Budget cuts mean the company, bedeviled by false alarms and arsons of vacant buildings, must cover almost 50 square miles (130 kilometres) on the west side, said Sergeant Shawn Atkins. As he spoke, water splashed on the concrete floor from a truck’s leaking 500-gallon tank.

Americans love a good ghost town. How else can one explain the large number of abandoned settlements across the country – and particularly in the southwest – that are kept in a state of arrested decay for the benefit of tourists? We also seem to be fascinated by the process that creates a ghost town. How else can one explain the hordes of journalists who have descended upon Detroit in recent years to chronicle the city’s decline?

Michigan Governor Rick Snyder plans to name an emergency manager to handle Detroit’s fiscal crisis, stripping power from local officials in a withered city that in 1940 was the fourth biggest in the U.S. and a thriving capital of industry. Snyder, 54, said Friday at a public meeting in Detroit that he plans to take a step he avoided a year ago. The move punctuates decades of decline in the home town of General Motors Co. His decision may inflame opponents, as the administration of a white Republican seizes control of a place that is predominantly black and Democratic.