Atlanta homeowner hit with $9,000 water bill

Maybe she has water from Fiji running through her pipes. Atlanta homeowner Blayne Beacham was shocked when she received a bill for $9,224.40 for a few months’ worth of water.

Beacham, who lives alone in a three-bedroom cottage, has been battling local authorities for months over her abnormally high water bills. But none came close to $9,000.

“That’s more than all my other bills have accrued over the last three years,” Beacham told WSBTV. She asked for a new meter, she said, but the Department of Watershed Management told her the meter was working fine. She also checked for leaks several times, most recently in April, when a certified plumber confirmed the pipes were healthy.

According to Beacham, a water official told him there had been a leak in the past that had been repaired. “It’s absolutely absurd,” Beacham told the Atlanta Journal Constitution. “I have no way of proving that I didn’t have a leak fixed, because I didn’t have a leak.”

To help diagnose the problem, the water management company installed a data logger, capable of measuring water consumption hour by hour. But Beacham isn’t convinced it will do him any good. “I think it’s just to buy them time, so I’ll either give up or I’ll have to pay because it’ll be too much time,” Beacham said.

Results from the data logger will not be ready until mid-July.

Beacham isn’t the only person in the Atlanta area facing water problems. Buckhead Patch has more on the local “water wars” and CNN has also reported on skyrocketing water bills in the city.

Clearly, Atlanta homeowners haven’t been as lucky as Kristin Harriger of Abilene, Texas. She received an electricity bill asking her to pay a whopping $1,381,783.92. But when Harriger called the utility company, they immediately admitted there was a calculation error: They charged him $1,000 per kilowatt hour instead of the usual $0.09.

%Gallery-141936%