Underground leak causes $7,500 utility bill

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Underground leak causes $7,500 utility bill

Wednesday, Mar. 17 by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) | 23 comments | Email this story

Imagine opening your quarterly utility bill and seeing you owe the equivalent of a mortgage or rent payment – or three.

That’s what happened to Lansdowne resident Dottie Jarvis when she got a bill in mid-February for $7,504.20.

Jarvis said she usually pays about $260 per quarter for water and sewer services for the home she rents on Kingsport Drive, which is serviced by the Town of Leesburg.

It turns out there was a leak in the pipe beneath the driveway that Jarvis had no way of knowing about. And in a case like this, the homeowner is responsible.

Jarvis couldn’t see the meter to tell how much water she was using, as the boxes are locked. And the water pressure in the home did not weaken to tip her off, something confirmed by the serviceman who ultimately fixed the leak.

“Even with a leak this size, he could not believe how high our water pressure was,” Jarvis said.

Although the leak was under the driveway and not inside the home, the owner of Jarvis’ home is responsible. Leesburg is only responsible for lines along the streets it services. From the water meter to the home is the homeowner’s responsibility.

The town has a policy in place to share some of the cost of the high utility bill with the customer when the leak is in a place where it is impossible to notice, like in Jarvis’ case.

Jarvis said that her bill has been lowered to $1,500, most of which her landlord will have to pay, in addition to the cost of fixing the leak.

She said she thinks the town should pay for the entire bill and only charge her what she averages per quarter since there is no way for her to read her meter and prevent a leak from going unnoticed for so long.

Leesburg Utility Director Randy Shoemaker said locked meter boxes are a standard in the utility industry.

“Just about every jurisdiction has a requirement that you can’t tamper with the meter box,” he said.

Leesburg is looking into acquiring in-home units that would provide digital readings for its customers. If and when they are acquired, Shoemaker does not anticipate the cost to the customers who want them being very high.

Jarvis said she feels she should have been notified sooner of her high water use.

With the Star Wide Area Fixed Network Automatic Reading System that Leesburg uses, everything is done electronically, according to Shoemaker.

Each water meter is equipped with a radio that transmits water usage to a computer in the town’s finance department for billing.

A meter reading for each customer is transmitted every 12 hours, and the computer’s software gives high and low reports.

But the system gives about 1,000 high reports per week, Shoemaker said.

“We make an effort to review the management reports; however, we don’t have sufficient personnel to review 1,000 reports a week,” Shoemaker said.
Jarvis ended up being one of the customers whose high report went unnoticed for nearly a month, causing the high utility bill.

“We didn’t see it in review of the reports we have,” Shoemaker said. “If we had seen it, we would have followed up on it.

Comments

Sun, May 02 at 08:32 PM by SST:

Does anything surprise you with Loudoun County. It kills me we live in the richest fastest growing county in the US, but Loudoun County stills seems to be behind the times on a lot of things. Has everyone noticed all the speed traps lately. We have to be hounded by the Sheriffs department when they have a budget shortfall. Forget about crime get out there and harrass our citizens beacuase we have a budget shortfall. Way to go Simpson!!

Fri, Apr 30 at 11:10 AM by isaidit:

Ms. Jarvis…..sell your home, change your name and move out of that joke a town Leesburg. Any utility company that would hold a homeowner responsible for paying a bill like this and no way of knowing a leak was even happening….well shaft them before they shaft you!

Leesburg homeowner said it:
The meter is sealed so the homeowner can�t check usage, and the software the Town of Leesburg uses apparently doesn�t register sudden spikes in usage appropriately, so. . this is the homeowners fault? Uh, I don�t think so.

Fairfax wrote:
Fairfax Water has a better policy, send them a copy of the repair bill and they will adjust the water bill to you average consumption. Much more fair than Leesburg.

HIRE A LAWYER! YOU MIGHT NOT EVEN NEED TO PAY ONE TO HANDLE THIS CASE….SOME LOVE TO TAKE ON THE BIG BAD GUYS.

Hire a Lawyer and get out of Leesburg!

Thu, Apr 22 at 12:18 PM by Megan:

There should be a way to set up an auto-call system so that when there is a high water usage report, an automated message is sent to the phone # on file asking the homeowner to check it out/call the water authority. Its not that difficult. If you are going to take away all of the common sense check points, there should be a faster time period for high usage notification.

Thu, Apr 22 at 09:13 AM by Nancy Hopkins:

I had a similar situation in Sterling-the bill wasn’t nearly as huge, but about 6 times normal. At first they thought there was a leak in the pipe to the street connection. I was about to pay $3K to replace the copper pipe, then I found out it was a running toilet in one of the bathrooms. Unlike Leesburg, the Sterling people wiped out the bill and just charged me the regular amount. They were very nice and cooperative, advising me NOT to just replace the pipe until I confirmed there was no other source of water wastage.

Sun, Apr 04 at 10:19 AM by therickster:

Not all water metered systems are created equal. The Badger Meter, Orion system, would have alerted the municipality’s software system of the leak and recorded the entire event. But, if there’s no personel to investigate, how can the customer be held responsible. Not all systems have locked vaults. Access is necessary for a customer to check their meter. Unfortunately, many customers do tamper with meters. The Orion system also dectects that… Idaho water operator

Sat, Apr 03 at 01:04 PM by Jan:

Unbelievable… so glad my husband is a plumber. When we moved into the county there was no water in the house and Leesburg Water told us we had to wait until Monday… period… it was Friday. We REALLY needed water since we had three fish tanks to set up. My resourceful husband went out to the curb and turned the water on himself. When Leesburg Water came out on Monday, they were mad… but what were we supposed to do? Go without water for 3 days? Is that even legal? Better yet, they owe us a credit from when we moved out of Leesburg. They told me it was applied to my PPT… really? The PPT I paid in full? Crooks…

Fri, Apr 02 at 06:43 PM by aricon25:

WOW,really??? This is completely unfair to the homeowner because the article clearly states that it was impossible to detect the water leak underneath the driveway. I think the County of Loudoun should foot the entire bill minus regular usage because they failed to tell the resident of their unusually high water usage. Another way the county makes money off their residents. Aren’t our taxes high enough?

Thu, Apr 01 at 01:08 PM by cey:

I believe there is more to it…perhaps a bug in their computer program or an issue with the “monitoring”. My bill went up over 10 times the norm when I moved and had the place up for sale. There were no leaks or other explanation and I tried to appeal via phone calls, but they knew that I could not return to personally fight it so I had to pay it. Very suspicious!

Wed, Mar 31 at 04:12 PM by Ted Andrews:

I hate Leesburg! Did you know that if you want to open up a resturant in the Town of Leesburg, they wil ask for a 50,000 to 150,000 deposit for anticipated water usage???? This dollar amount is actually down becuase of a recently passed bill that lowered the required amount. In addtion, the new bill allows the business to spred the payment over a 2 or 3 yr period. But, this is absurd and not very business friendly. What kind of business person has 50K to 150K to fork over event before they open their business and start generating revenue? And who has an extra $1,400 to $4,000 a month for that ‘water bill’ if they did spread the payments over 36 months??

Fri, Mar 26 at 08:03 PM by Ed:

“Leesburg Utility Director Randy Shoemaker said locked meter boxes are a standard in the utility industry.

�Just about every jurisdiction has a requirement that you can�t tamper with the meter box,� he said.”

Something my mother said when I was a child…“if everyone you knew jumped off a cliff, would you do it too?”

Doing something *JUST* because someone else does it, doesn’t make it right, especially when you *KNOW* that it causes people problems and you then turn around and charge them for it!

Come-on…do the *RIGHT* thing and either unlock the meters, offer a remote meter viewer or don’t charge the resident for what they can’t control!

Thu, Mar 25 at 08:43 AM by another leesburg homeower:

Some how this doesn’t at all surprise me with Loudoun CO, They get you coming and going with the high taxes and everything else and don’t do anything to help out the people that pay the taxes. So sorry you have to go thru this!!!

Tue, Mar 23 at 03:48 PM by Mark:

I’m sure the community can pull together and spend a few hours on a Saturday volunteering our time for the water department to follow up on these 1,000+ leaks! Just invite us to signup and we’ll be there.

It is odd that this high tech system can’t send the homeowner an automated email…

Tue, Mar 23 at 08:35 AM by Fairfax:

Fairfax Water has a better policy, send them a copy of the repair bill and they will adjust the water bill to you average consumption. Much more fair than Leesburg.

Mon, Mar 22 at 08:30 PM by Mark D:

I am a water service tech for a municipality.
most times when you have an underground leak, you can hear it. people arent allowed in the meter vaults because they will try to sabotage the meter so they get a lower bill. and if we hired personel to review the leak reports we would also have to hire more service techs to physically inspect the leak. who wants to have thier water rates raised to pay for the additional people when most of the time they are not needed.

Mon, Mar 22 at 05:11 PM by CL:

its all b.s. anyway, who winds up paying for leaks in public right of ways?

Mon, Mar 22 at 10:33 AM by alok chatterjie:

I live on N.Sterling Blv, Sterling & recently moveed there from Reston, but seem to have high gas, electric and water bills. Is there a way of comparing ones bills to those of your neighbors in simillar households?

Fri, Mar 19 at 05:00 PM by Jim:

You can get an insurance policy for this exact problem for a few bucks a month through Dominion Electric. I signed up for the policy and about 3 months later i had a leak. Dominion paid for the entire bill. Here’s the link. Worth the money. http://www.dom.com/products/home-repair-programs/water-line-replacement/water-line-replacement.jsp

Thu, Mar 18 at 04:03 PM by DHoward:

I had to replace the main line to my house approximately this time last year. My leak was so subtle that it went undetected for 2 billing cycles. The only way to tell for certain is to turn off the water inside of the house and then go outside to check the meter, usually in a little can near the sidewalk in front of your house. If the little red dial is still spinning, you’ve got a leak.

The company we hired to do our replacement work used tunneling equipment and did the job for around $4500 and they did a great job…4 holes in the yard, didn’t have to dig up my driveway, etc. The thing that should be more concerning is they told us they’d done about 10-20 homes in my neighborhood (Greenway Farms). Same thing happened to my neighbor across the street approximately 6 months later. That seems like a lot of homes having similar issues. My home wasn’t even 9 years old at the time it happened. Shoddy building practices perhaps? Who knows, but in the end the town needs to do a better job of letting people know when it looks like their quarterly usage is higher than normal. Even if they had 1000 hits for high usage in a quarter, they should send an email or snail mail to the residence or business to alert them so the problem can be addressed sooner than later. What good is it to have that function in the software is it isn’t going to be used?

Thu, Mar 18 at 03:44 PM by Leesburg Homeowner:

The meter is sealed so the homeowner can’t check usage, and the software the Town of Leesburg uses apparently doesn’t register sudden spikes in usage appropriately, so. . this is the homeowners fault? Uh, I don’t think so.

Thu, Mar 18 at 09:46 AM by esm:

Seems to be a trend of leaks under driveways in Loudoun County. My immediate 2 neighbors both had this issue and the cost to fix it is betw $7,500 and $10,000, which doesn’t include the cost of the water bill. They also have to rip up the entire front of your property, lawn and driveway. Because of that, we got insurance on our water line right away. Interestly enough, we just got a water bill that was 3x our usual amount and we had an internal leak. These utility companies need to become better equipped to monitor such fluctuations, bottom line.

Thu, Mar 18 at 09:23 AM by JST:

Not having sufficient personnel is not a good enough reason. If you’re generating 1000 reports a week, you need to hire someone to review them. Like a business would, you know? But this is the town of Leesburg. What do you expect?

Thu, Mar 18 at 07:25 AM by rmljr:

We make an effort to review the management reports; however, we don�t have sufficient personnel to review 1,000 reports a week,

Duh, You wouldn’t have to review 1000 reports each week. Any reporting software should be able to flag and product a report based on its variance. Any variance above or below a stated threshold would show in a specific report.

Thu, Mar 18 at 07:08 AM by Syligirl:

What kind of protection do homeowner have-how can a person know there is a problem if nothing is wrong within the home-who checks these kind things-the water company should have so system in place-how horrid for the homeowners-who do you call to inspect your outside utilities running into your home? Is this something covered by insurance. It should would have been nice if this informaiton was provide in the article.

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