"I have never seen these kinds of blunders in the
20 years that I have been working on these issues,"
Quinn said. "Ordinary people keep insisting their
bills are wrong. When a manual read is done, the
problem is corrected."

They are people like Florence Ischkum, an elderly
widow, who started receiving bills of between $5,000
and $6,000 last summer, according to her daughter,
Linda K. Edwards.

"Thank goodness we question every single billing, and
we are always told they are working on the problem and
it will be corrected by the next billing," Edwards
said in a letter to me.

L "My mother just received her April bill for $6,305.88.
Another phone call elicited the information that her
true bill is $193.46," Edwards said.

An automated meter reading was responsible for the
unbelievable billing error, said Karyn Pettigrew, a
spokeswoman for Peoples Energy.

Chicago Sun-Times

-- spider (spider0@usa.net), April 20, 2001