$700 water bill due to leak

[Amber Williamson]

I moved into a house in November, and I'm renting it. This is the first house I've lived in without my parents and i live with 2 roommates. I thought that when I signed up for the watershed I had set up automatic bill pay, but I didn't. I don't use a lot of water, i take fast showers and wash dishes by hand when I use them. My roommates are pretty similar. One is a guy who showers like once a week and only eats takeout. So basically i assumed my water bill would be pretty low and all would be fine. 

3 months in, the floor starts to split in the living room (a huge wave in the floor that developed quickly and was 10 inches tall at its peak) and people are commenting on how it smells so musty/moldy in my house. I'm a homebody with a bad sense of smell, so i was both used to it and not smelling it. Same with the other roommates. I started to look more closely at the house and saw mold growing in every room. My landlord sent two guys over here a week later to check out the mold and the split in the floor. They said the hot water heater under the house had been leaking and had caused both the mold and the floor to split. I know nothing about plumbing and am 22 years old. I heard "leak" and thought oh that's just a tiny bit of water... 

They fixed the heater on Jan 31, spent days replacing all the flooring in the living room, and also fixed the mold issue. Today i saw in my stack of mail a letter from my watershed company. i had opted for paperless bills so i thought oh huh. I opened it and it's a bill for $1650, and a notice that they will shut off the water if i don't pay in 10 days. It said we used 22,000 gallons of water last month. We don't use the hose, sprinklers, or dishwasher. Obviously i'm shocked and feeling this overwhelming sense of doom and panic. I look at the website and it says this month we've used 4 ccfs (3,000 gallons) vs last month's 28 ccfs (22,000 gallons), but the only thing that's changed is that the hot water heater was fixed. So our bill for this month currently is $80, which makes sense for 3 people. The bill for last month was $667. I am really at a loss for what to do here. i'm responsible for the water bill and my roommates do the other bills. i basically had googled "average water bill 3 people" when we moved in and thought ok it'll be somewhere between $70-100 a month so i didn't sweat it.but now seeing that all this time in actuality the water heater has been leaking and i didn't know it, it's probably going to cost me $1650. it's not my fault the hot water heater below the house was leaking, but it is my fault that i didn't realize it because i didn't see the bills and immediately know that something was wrong. is there anything i can do at this time? or is this just a tough "you live and you learn" lesson for me? 

Thank you for reading. Thank you if you have any advice!