Abilene woman shocked to discover nearly million-dollar water bill

Tobin Smith
·2 min read

ABILENE, Texas (KTAB/KRBC) – A local woman was shocked to discover that the City of Abilene charged her close to a million dollars for a monthly water bill.

What would you do? Abilene woman receives water bill for nearly $1 million

Debbie Vicary discovered the $911,116.46 bill earlier this week when she received a paper copy of the statement in the mail. When she attempted to call the customer service number to resolve the issue, she did not receive the answers she was hoping for.

“I said, ‘I need to talk to someone about my almost million-dollar water bill. Can you tell me what I really owe?’ She put me on hold again and came back and said, “We can’t tell you. We don’t know what you owe.”

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Using an auto-pay method that takes the money directly from your bank account when your bill is due, Vicary was charged for more than 99 million gallons of water for a month. When Vicary called the water company before that massive charge hit, she was informed that the city could not reverse the charge.

“I’m calling you two days before it’s supposed to be drafted, so why can’t we do it now?” She said, [Customer Service Representative] “I don’t know. That’s just what they told me,” Vicary recalled.

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The charge eventually hit Vicary’s account and overdrafted it by hundreds of thousands of dollars. Luckily, Vicary was able to communicate with her bank to get that charge bounced back.

“The debt is out of my account now. It still happened, and it’s not over. I have yet to speak to a person of authority, and that’s what bothers me. I just hope that it gets to the people it needs to get to so that this doesn’t happen to somebody else,” Vicary said.

KTAB and KRBC have also reached out to the City of Abilene for clarification, but as of the publication of this article, no official comment has been released.

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