Are Augustans still paying for the city’s cyber attack?
AUGUSTA, Ga. (WRDW/WAGT) - The city of Augusta is processing higher-than-average water bills as a result of May’s cyber attack.
Augustans have been taking to social media recently asking for clarity on why some of their water-utility bills have recently doubled, in some cases tripled.
The issue was first addressed at last week’s community meeting on homelessness at the Brynwood Swim Club. Commissioner Sean Frantom responded to a neighbor, saying the rise in bills is due to the cyber attack that hit central systems back in May of this year.
One woman says her bill has gone from $40 in May to $70 for the month of June, which is a 75 percent increase.
There are about 75,000 water meters scattered throughout Richmond County. Augusta Utility says that was too many to manually check through during Augusta’s cyber attack that shut down their central system.
The solution? They went back through previous monthly averages and billed accordingly, which is why you’re seeing the recent hike in prices.
Steve Little, Assistant Director for Finance and istration of Augusta Utilities, said: “It was down for like five weeks. During that time, anyone’s meter who was due to be read was estimated.”
Lily Youngblood says she’s not satisfied with that response, “How can you give a number when you can’t read the meter?”
In a normal month, Youngblood and her husband use about 3,000 to 5,000 gallons. Recently, she says the utility department has billed them citing 13,000 gallons of usage in June and 10,000 in July.
“I reached out to the water department to ask, ‘hey, what’s going on?’ said Youngblood. “We’d either have to have a leak in the house, we don’t have a pool, we haven’t been running the sprinkler system, so everything was off.”
Augusta Utilities says the cyber attack rendered electric readers useless to measure water meters for five weeks after the attack started, and with about 75,000 meters to read in Richmond County, they say the job would’ve been too big for their 15 employees to each tackle 5,000 meters a month.
The solution turned to estimating averages from the previous three months to get the right price.
For May to June, that would mean looking at February, March, and April.
Now with the annual increase in summer water use, the typical price bump that happens slowly over two months has now hit all in one.
“We just need to caution people to be aware that, if they sprinkled like before Masters and sprinkled in May, it’s not going to show up until you’ve got that next bill, and it’s probably going to be about double what you expected, but then your bills would be normal again after that,” said Little. “We understand that that’s a problem when you pay a small amount and then get a big amount, but keep in mind that it would’ve been the same over a 2-month period, you basically just got delayed a month, and you got a free month of...or a little bit extra time to pay the first month.”
Augusta Utilities say that bills should return back to that normal pace around the next pay period, but if you still want to dispute your bill or what your water meter is reading, you can call Utilities or head into their office.
A lack of new meters is also cause for delay. Augusta Utilities say they are aware some meters may need to be replaced entirely if they are reading inaccurately, and those meters are on backorder.
These malfunctions can be caused by age, or a snapped wire. If the system stops working, it can continually read the same number of water intake that was given when the machine stopped functioning.
Mayor Garnett Johnson confirms this is the case, saying Augusta’s Utilities department is having issues with reading their meters, which is having an effect on accurately pinpointing the amount people should be billed.
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