Residents in an apartment building on Ben Yehudah Street in Tel Aviv discovered that they were being charged for the light railway's water bill, N12 reported.
The residents opened their water bill on Tuesday to discover that they were being charged hundreds of shekels more than usual. The high bill was so unusual that the water company enclosed a warning that this bill was 2,000% higher than usual.
Another resident noticed something was strange in June when he spotted an unusual pipe that was attached to the water infrastructure in the building. He followed the pipe and found that it led directly to the nearby building area of the light railway.
Upon this discovery, the residents asked the company that manages the building to look into the matter. The manager checked with the water company and confirmed with them that there was no leak. The manager then turned to NTA, the company that is handling the building of the light railway. The company told the manager that the pipe belonged to the contractor that worked with them, but it was leading water to the building, not away from it.
This explanation sounded suspicious to the building's residents, so the matter was looked into again, and sure enough, the light rail contractor had accidentally attached his pipe to the building's water supply, and the residents had been paying that bill for two months — a bill that reached as much as NIS 736.
The contractor invited the residents to send him their bills and promised to reimburse them.
"We are happy that the contractor did not try to shirk the responsibility and will return the money that we have been required to pay," Adar, one of the building's residents, told N12. "But what's outrageous is that no one told us, not that they were connecting to our building, and not that a mistake had occurred. The entire matter was on us to figure out, and it's lucky we got there in time because if they hadn't noticed that there was a wrong connection to our water pipe two months ago, we would have gotten the bills and thought that we needed to pay them."