It Figures

$381 Million

Kansas state officials say the winter storm that knocked power out to thousands of customers across Kansas continues to get costlier. The newest damage estimate puts the figure at $381 million. The Kansas adjutant general’s department and the Federal Emergency Management Agency said that makes it the most expensive storm ever to hit the state. Maj. Gen. Tod Bunting said the damage was particularly bad for rural electric cooperatives, which lost meters, poles and transmission lines when the ice and snow fell in December. Adding to the cost was that many of the lines were made of materials no longer manufactured, so they had to be rebuilt. The storm caused six deaths and injured 11 others.

$4.7 Million

A multimillion-dollar dispute between an Omaha-based insurance agency and the state of Florida returned to the Nebraska Supreme Court on March 7 more than a decade after it began. The Nebraska company, Countrywide Insurance Agency, maintains the dispute was mishandled at trial in 2006 and that it shouldn’t have to pay Florida the nearly $4.7 million a judge ordered. Both sides of the case accused the other of using delay tactics. They’ve done a masterful job of dragging this out said attorney Robert Craig, who represents Florida. But attorney William Gast, who represents Countrywide and its owner, David Fulkerson, has a different view. Indeed, it is Florida’s unlimited resources which have cruelly protracted this travesty for David Fulkerson for so long, Gast wrote in one of his briefs. No matter who is responsible for the delays of the case, the recent hearing marked the third time the state Supreme Court has heard about some aspect of it.

$400,000

A jury has found a hospital liable in an 11-month-old boy’s beating death and ordered hospital officials to pay $400,000 in damages to the boy’s relatives. Six jurors deliberated more than eight hours before returning their verdict in the lawsuit filed in April 2006 by the child’s father against Methodist Hospital and doctors Gary Thompson and Michael Turner. The Marion County jury found that Clarian Health, which operates Methodist, was liable, but that Turner and Thompson were not, in the boy’s death. Riley Leon Chilton’s lawsuit claimed that Methodist Hospital and the physicians failed to properly identify and report suspected child abuse when Chilton’s son, Chance Chilton, was treated at the hospital in August 1998 for a skull fracture. It claims those alleged failures resulted in Chance being returned to his mother and her live-in boyfriend after he was released from the hospital. Less than a month later, Chance was fatally beaten by his mother’s boyfriend, John Beauchamp, who pleaded guilty to battery in 2003.