Swamped by NWC
Published:Tuesday | August 16, 2011 | 12:00 AM
- Greater Portmore resident gets whopping $48m bill
Gary Spaulding, Senior Gleaner Writer
Talk about drowning in debt! Just ask Hortense Hall, a Greater Portmore resident who has been slapped with a whopping $48-million water bill by the National Water Commission (NWC).
Hall, who was quick to assert that she was not awash with cash, was still in possession of her sense of humour.
"This (the bill) looks like it is for the entire parish," she quipped in an interview with The Gleaner/Power 106 News Centre.
But even so, it seems that St Catherine would have been inundated as she and three other members of her family are being asked to foot a bill for using 26,000 litres of the precious commodity in only one month.
Corporate public relations manager at the NWC, Charles Buchanan, readily conceded that something was amiss. "Something would have to be wrong and that would be addressed by the commission, and very likely the system would have been in place to deal (specifically) with an error like that."
Hall made no secret that she was swamped, as she revealed that four people occupy the household that attracted the multimillion-dollar bill.
She had up to yesterday to fork out the mind-boggling amount of $48,086,500.42, as the due date for payment was recorded as August 15.
The water bill has hit Hall at a time when most Jamaicans are struggling to stay afloat, as utility and other bills have left them submerged in debt.
For many consumers, it would have been a shock to see the $48 million dispatched to Hall at a time when the glare is constantly on light and power company, the Jamaica Public Service.
Asked what her electricity consumption was like at home, Hall said a two-storey structure was on the premises.
She said she occupied the ground floor. "There are just me, my mother; a daughter who came up for the summer holidays and my five-year-old child," she disclosed.
She said there was a separate meter measuring water usage on the second floor.
Hall told The Gleaner she got the bill on Sunday, about 10 minutes after vowing that it was the last estimated bill she would be paying.
"I was saying that I can't understand why the NWC keeps sending estimated bills and they came the other day and dug out my meter, put in a new meter and I am still getting an estimated bill."
Hall suggested that the $48 million on an actual bill (not an estimated) was incurred out of a comedy of errors that is not funny.
She suggested the mistake might have been made when she acquired a neighbouring premises (that she rented), but the NWC failed to install a meter there and might have sent the accumulated bill to her.
Hall told The Gleaner that she had made a formal complaint to the National Consumer League about the extended period of time she had been waiting and that, instead of installing a meter at the new premises, the NWC dug up her old meter and replaced it with a digital one.