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A retired Southern California nurse and her Vietnam War veteran husband are being forced to pay nearly $10,000 for their water bill over a meter that had been broken for years.
Joyce Howell, 82, said she and her husband have lived in their Los Angeles home since the 1960s, where they raised 10 children, but only recently were they hit with the staggering bill, NBC Los Angeles reported.
Earlier this year, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) billed the couple more than $9,200 for water used between February 2023 and March 2026.
Howell — initially suspected a leak somewhere in the house was behind the hefty bill — so she asked her daughter, Stephanie, to contact LADWP for answers.
An LADWP representative eventually told the family that the meter had been broken for those three years and they had not been charged for their water, but that the couple still had to pay for what they had used.
“You’re going to have to pay the bill,” the representative said, according to Howell’s daughter.
Howell’s daughter said she was stunned that LADWP expected her elderly parents, who are both retired and living on a fixed income, to pay the massive bill.
“You are coming at my parents that have dedicated their lives as family, people, decent community, good parents, and give them back to community, and then you come with them with this bill at the end of their lives,” Stephanie told the outlet.
“Elderly people don’t get additional income. They can’t go back to work. This is it for them.”
The couple’s daughter also blasted LADWP for not catching the issue sooner.
“They should have read the meter, and they should have had whoever the technician to come out on a monthly basis or whatever to see if the meter is being read or if it was broken or not,” she said.
LADWP official Joseph Ramallo told NBC Los Angeles that stuck meters are rare but not unheard of for a utility that operates around 700,000 water meters and 1.7 million electric meters.
Ramallo said the meter at the Howells’ 3,100-square-foot home had been broken for more than three years, but the utility can only bill customers for up to three years of past usage.
The home typically racks up a monthly water bill of just over $300, he said.
He explained that LADWP has a “responsibility” to charge customers “if water is used,” and that the utility will “work with them under terms they can afford.”
LADWP said it offered the couple a long-term payment plan to cover the bill.
Howell said she has “no problem paying the bill” — but insisted that “if it was not working, somebody should have done something” long before things got so out of hand.
After news of the couple’s massive water bill spread, LADWP cut their bimonthly payments from $360 to $100, according to NBC Los Angeles.