The following is what sometimes happens when you pretty much demand a follow-up column.
Denver Water requested one after I wrote about a woman named Kelley Brooks who came home from vacation to discover a massive, somebody-please-call-Noah, two-month water bill of more than $7,000.
The reason for Denver Water’s request was, in part, the sheer volume of reader responses to the column, including many tales from customers who also found themselves saddled with mysteriously high bills. Their stories make Denver Water look none too good, so Denver Water wanted to make sure everyone knows the source of Brooks’ high bill is no big mystery.
As suspected water leaks go, Kelley Brooks’ is the unchallenged champ, both in gallons lost and money owed.
By way of background, she was away visiting folks in Texas in August and September.
When she returned to her 1,800-square- foot home and opened her bills, she nearly fell over when the one from Denver Water topped $7,000.
Denver Water, to its credit, had, in fact, sent crews to Brooks’ home during both months when it noticed the unusually high usage.
But with Brooks gone, the crews got no answer at her door and allowed the meter to spin.
Nearly 900,000 gallons of water leaked from her home over the past two months.
It is right here where her story veers wildly from what the dozens of suspected water wastrels and leakers wrote or called in to tell me about their own issues with the water company.
In Brooks’ case a good-sized Denver Water crew met with her and began poking around, looking for that leak. They arrived shortly after I’d visited her and contacted Denver Water about her bill.
The first thing water crews did was shut off the main valve to the sprinkler system. The meter stopped spinning wildly, she said.
A leak!
According to the crew, the suspected leak in the sprinkler system was putting out six gallons of water per minute.
Others with similar problems have not had the satisfaction of an answer to their woes.
A woman named Molly wrote a detailed letter of how she lives alone in an 1,100- square-foot home and was charged for using 2,250 gallons per day in August.
“There is no way I could have used that much water,” Molly wrote, outlining in detail how she went to the Assessor’s Office, mapped out her 6,250-square-foot lot and determined such usage would have put her home beneath 1,348 feet of water.
At the end of the day, Molly says, she was told to pay up or have her water shut off.
A woman named Sonja described fighting Denver Water for two years, paying more than $3,000 on three occasions, despite her contractor, plumber and sprinkler company finding no leaks on her property.
“THIS HAS TO BE FRAUD!” she writes.
A plumber and his crew are now digging up Kelley Brooks’ front yard.
“It is all extremely strange,” she said. “By their calculations, about a million gallons of water has poured through the sprinkler system in two months.”
But there is not one sign of any of it anywhere.
“I’m not denying there is a leak. I just want the plumber to tell me if my house is now sitting atop an Olympic-sized swimming pool.
“It has to be.”
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
