A number of years back Atlanta replaced the meters on my street with remote-read meters. Unfortunately they read the new meters using the previous meter’s reading, and the system assumed that everyone’s meter had rolled over past zero…Pretty much everyone on my block got five-figure water bills over the next few months…and each one took even more months to sort out…eventually it took a call to our city councilwoman to get them to look at it as a systematic issue. We would have gone to the press next, but another neighborhood beat us to that punch.
“Mr. and Mrs. Nestlé could not be reached for comment.”
Someone had to step up to challenge Comcast for their title!
Linked article had the maths for how much water that would actually equal to if the bill was accurate 
Let’s do a little math, shall we? One hundred cubic feet (HCF)
of water equals 748 gallons, and the DWP says the Goreshters used 8,938
HCFs during the several months that they were not billed.That’s nearly 6.7 million gallons of water, or enough to flood half the San Fernando Valley
The good news is that now we know who to blame for the drought.
Now I have a new home improvement project: underground lake with secret submarine to putter around in it.
Yea they act all sweet and innocent, but it’s obvious they were cooking meth.
We in northern California have always known and have been saying for decades that the problem was in LA.
Who knew it was only two people.q
And is it physically possible, with all taps (faucets) left on for that period of time - to use that much water?
Well Faucet | Regional Water Providers Consortium says
Federal Plumbing Standards now specify that kitchen faucets use no more than 2.5 gpm and bathroom faucets use no more than 2.2 gpm, though several use less quite effectively.
and
This is especially true if your sink faucets are older and don’t have aerators, since some older models can use 5 or more gallons per minute (gpm).
So at 5 GPM one faucet would require 1.3 million minutes or about two and a half YEARS of continuous operation. So half a dozen old faucets pouring out water continuously could do it, assuming the pipes draining the water away could handle that kind of flow rate.
Possible? Yes.
Plausible? Not really.
Likely? Not at all.
Johnny Carson asked all his New York viewers to flush their toilets at the same time…I can’t seem to find any internet evidence of this…but I do remember it being talked about.
It is the California drought, it just sucks up peoples water at the rate of millions of gallons per minute.
I think Steve’s math is suspect. Correct me if I’m wrong, but the way I calculate it, one hundred cubic feet would yield a puddle of 1200 square feet in area if it’s one inch deep. 8,938 HCFs would thus give us 10,725,600 square feet of inch-deep puddle. And a square mile is 27,878,400 square feet, right? The San Fernando Valley is roughly 260 square miles, and our inch-deep flood is only a bit over six-tenths of a mile on a side.
Oh, well. Guess I’ll put my surfboard away, Snake.
What’s really annoying about this, from a public policy standpoint, is that we can no longer rely on the water bill to send an unambiguous signal to those who don’t conserve their water.
Meanwhile, this very morning another hydrant was sheared off, spilling thousands of gallons of water. And last week, three separate water mains ruptured…along with another broken hydrant.
I wish these were isolated incidents, but I know they’ve been happening every week for the last 8-10 weeks.
Quite possibly.
I was tempted to try it myself, but when i realised the info required to calculate it multiplied by crazy non-metric unit conversions, i (with my borderline ‘C’ grade maths basic qualification (UK GCSE)) ran off screaming in terror 
100 cubic feet=2.83 cubic meters
8938 hcf=25294 cubic meters
10 olympic sized swimming pools.
The average American family of four uses 400 gallons of water per day. (1.5 cubic meters per day)
so this is equivalent to about 46 years worth of water.
Yeah, only $50k. Consider it an investment, think of what that water will be worth if the drought continues. Probably pay for the submarine and excavation.
