A North Texas woman's fight with a utility company has lasted more than a year. Her toilets overflowed in her home after the company dug lines in her front yard. And when she couldn't get the company to reimburse her expenses, she called NBC 5 Responds.
"Before the work was done, I had the prettiest yard in this cul-de-sac," Billy Henslee said.
Now she's not quite so proud. Small holes dot Henslee's Cleburne front lawn where AT&T, plumbers and inspectors have had to dig for a year now, all because AT&T showed up one day and said they needed to do some work in her yard.
"There was a break in the cable somewhere and they were tracing the cable to repair it," Henslee said.
She doesn't even have AT&T service but agreed to the work. While the repair was underway something literally didn't smell quite right to Henslee.
"The sewer was backing up in my house and I didn't realize," she said.
She says an AT&T foreman told her the crew putting in her fiber optic line drilled a hole in her sewer line.
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"It leaked under the commodes, all through the commodes in the house," Henslee said.
If that's not bad enough, she had to call a plumber herself to fix it.
"It was actually $2,564, is the total bill. That's a lot of money," Henslee said.
She paid it, believing AT&T would pay her back, but after nearly a year she never got the money. She did get more holes in her yard after AT&T, plumbers and city inspectors came by to figure out what went wrong.
"I could never get them to respond to me," she said.
But NBC 5 Responds did. We reached out to AT&T, explaining that this had being going on for more than a year. This week, not only did Henslee get her reimbursement check, but AT&T also sent landscapers to fill in all those holes dug in her front lawn.
We asked AT&T what went wrong and how such a problem went on for so long.
After paying her and fixing the lawn, a spokesman apologized for the delay and inconvenience, saying it all was an "administrative error."
Remember, no claim should take a year to get fixed, so you shouldn't wait that long. Call someone else in the company, and when all else fails call NBC 5 Responds at 877-573-7763.
