$700 water bill due to leak

[Amber Williamson]

Hi! I'm a renter and i've come here to hopefully get advice on this situation. If this isn't allowed then i'll be on my way!

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 roommate basically just doesn't even live here. 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 probably 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, and i thought "oh, this mold is why i've had a persistent cough at night and started needing to use my asthma inhaler again...". 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 (up until the workers came and fixed it), it's probably going to cost me $1650. if i had known my showers would end up costing me so much i would've savored them way more!! it's not my fault the hot water heater below the house was leaking, but it is my fault that i didn't discover the problem sooner. is there anything i can do at this time? should i talk to my leasing agent? it's a huge rental company and they have hundreds of properties and i don't know the actual landlord. 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!

[Nathan Gesner]

It's interesting that your first response is to post the question here. The only people that can really fix this will be your Property Manager or Landlord. As a Landlord myself, I would definitely pay this bill because it was due to the failure of the water heater, not your use. They should pay the water bill because it is clearly the fault of the home, not you. If they refuse to pay it, then you'll need to pay it and then seek restitution through legal means.

You can also call the utility provider and explain what happened. They will often credit you back some of the charges because of the situation. It may help if you have a copy of the repair bill.