ATLANTA – If your water bill is normally around $13 a month and then the next month it jumps to $20,000, it will grab your attention – and of course, your wallet.

One Fox 5 viewer’s bill ended up being over $81,000, so we decided to go door-to-door to see what the property’s neighbors were experiencing. We discovered that Department of Watershed Management records showed high water usage alerts going off for three miles along the same road around the same time.

Gail Mapp inherited a building on a busy stretch of Donald Lee Hollowell Parkway after her mother died. She continued to pay the water bill without hesitation because it was only $13.12. But the old pottery shop sat locked and unused.

In December 2022, the Department of Watershed Management changed the meter register—the device that measures water usage—because it was no longer transmitting usage data. The following month, the water bill for that unused address skyrocketed.

“I saw $16,000,” Gail Mapp said as she opened the water bill.

That was in January 2023. In February, the amount rose further to $17,477. The next month, it was another $17,000 and more. In April, it exceeded $20,230. In the end, the total was over $81,000.

For Gail Mapp, this made no sense.

“Be very careful,” she warned as we unlocked the door and entered a dilapidated room with a collapsed roof. It is uninhabitable.

She said it had been like this for over a decade. After the fourth bizarre water bill, she called her first plumber.

“They said there was no water and no working pipes in the building. There was no water coming into the building from the meter,” she explained, standing next to a large opening in the roof.

That same month, in April 2023, a technician from Atlanta Watershed Management stopped by. His notes show that “No leak found” on the city’s side of the meter.

And mind you, neither the city nor the plumber saw any signs of standing water, running water, or any water at all, which is amazing because DWM’s billing shows that this address used nearly 700,000 gallons of water in one month. Every day, this “leak on paper” should produce the equivalent of two large swimming pools of water. Yet two experts have not reported a single drop.

Gail Mapp asked the water company to pay her bill for $81,082.

She said: “Our request for adjustment was rejected.”

She appealed. City Representative Daniel McCrary said this on March 26, 2024, at her appeal hearing at the City of Atlanta Water and Sewer Department:

“I want to be clear: just because there are no plumbing in the building doesn’t mean there can’t be leaks.”

But one of Gail Mapp’s three plumbers who came by specialized in finding underground leaks.

“He showed me on his meter that when you turn it on, enough water flows into the pipe and then it stops. And that’s why no more water comes in here.”

She explained to the hearing panel and the Fox 5 I-Team that when the city meter was turned on, only one gallon flowed from the city meter into the line, which went nowhere.

Without anyone having to intervene, she told the appeals committee that her water bills had suddenly dropped – from $4,127 to $631 to $194.

In late summer 2023, DWM’s own records show that the meter reading register was defective again. The water company replaced it. Once again. And you know what?

“In September the price was back at $13.12,” she said.

Although the Department of Watershed Management ultimately credited the account with more than $5,000, citing “billing errors” as the reason, a bill of $76,000 still remains.

We wondered if the Mapps were the only ones with unusually high water bills. The Fox 5 I-Team found in city records that DWM’s internal system alerted them to unusually high water usage in the same commercial district of Donald Lee Hollowell Parkway around the same time the Mapps’ high bills were accruing.

We asked the Department of Watershed Management if this was a coincidence or a connection. We have not yet received an answer. In the meantime, Gail Mapp is suing the company.

“I have to hire a lawyer, go to court and not talk about how much time this investigation and the fight against them have taken.”