Utility sends $1600 bill for destroyed home

Good day all. In another chapter of utter and complete stupidity, the Long Island Power Authority has been sending a bill to a homeowner who’s home was leveled during Hurricane Sandy last year.

To begin with, the Long Island Power Authority ((The Long Island Power Authority or LIPA)) is a government owned corporation. Right off the bat, this is a problem. They aren’t beholding to anyone other then politicians. Certainly, they aren’t answerable to their actual customers, which is why you get stupidity like this. Here are a few details from AoL Real Estate ((AoL Real Estate? Not the New York Slimes?)):

Kiernan Burke, a resident in the Queens borough of New York City, was charged $1,600 for electricity and gas usage over the past seven months, and he would dutifully pay his debt — if his home had even existed in that time. The Burke family’s home was destroyed in October 2012 by a fire that swallowed a swath of the Breezy Point neighborhood in Queens as a result of Hurricane Sandy. Their house — which had been in the Burke family for four generations — was one of 80 to 100 that burned to the ground and Sandy roared through.

Uh huh, so this home and others burned down? And LIPA continued to send them bills? Couldn’t they, you know, send out a meter reader to take an actual reading? From NBC New York:

Homeowners sued the power company, saying it was negligent in not cutting off power to the area, which they say sparked the fire. Burke wonders how the company could possibly have billed families after that.

“How on earth could they, with a straight face, not even have the common courtesy and the dignity to understand that certain addresses were wiped off the map by their negligence?” he said. “It’s just the highest level of ineptitude. It’s crazy.”

Ineptitude? How about criminal stupidity? Everyone knew that area had been smashed hard by the storm. The LIPA should have cut the gas, but that is something for the courts to sort out. I want to know why they sent these people a bill for a home that was gone.

Burke said LIPA told him the bills were based on estimated meter readings. But no meter survived the fire at his house or any of the more than 100 homes that once stood in that part of Breezy Point.

Estimated meter readings. Do you know how that works? Basically, they can’t be bothered to send out a meter reader so they take a look at old bills and then make a guess. As you can see, there are a few issues with this. Personally, I think it’s nothing less then outright fraud. You are being charged for goods you might not have received, like, Oh I don’t know, Gas and Electricity perhaps?

Now I won’t say this doesn’t happen with privately held, (as in held by stockholders in the private sector), utilities, but you can bet that if one of them tried to pull something like this, they would be keel hauled, drawn and quartered and then sued. Since this is a government entity, it’s “Oh well.” And the political morons wonder why trust in government is at historic lows.

Thatisall

~The Angry Webmaster~

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