from: ZDNet [1]

January 31st, 2008
Tornado destroyed woman’s house: then she gets this $2,025.45 bill from Time Warner Cable
Posted by Russell Shaw @ 3:21 pm

From Wisconsin’s Kenosha News comes this story that after a January 7 tornado demolished her home, and ensuing rain and snow made it a bear to fix, a woman from the area has received a $2,025.45 bill from her (now former, well duh) cable television service.

Yes, strange but true. Ann Beam, the woman at the center of this story and in the pic above, has been billed by Time Warner Cable for $2,025.45- mostly for five cable boxes and five remote controls.

Beam called Time Warner Cable. Spoke to a couple people there, including a “manager.” The manager said there was nothing he could do.

“They said I would have to take the bill and turn it in to my insurance company,” Beam tells the Kenosha News. Reporter Jill Tatge-Rozell writes that Beam says she was instructed to get reimbursed for the equipment and then pay the bill. Beam said she explained the equipment was nine years old and the insurance company would only give her a depreciated amount in return.

She turned to volunteer community coordinator Kandi Horton and the media for help, including the Kenosha News, which is main local paper that covers Wheatland.

Hey, we’re the media, too. And so is the Consumerist, which picked up the story.

“We understand this is an unusual situation,” Celeste Flynn, director of public affairs for Time Warner Cable, told the paper. “All they will need to do is call and we will take the equipment off their account.”

To smooth out the process on the books, Flynn also said that Time Warner Cable will report the equipment as losses itself, rather than require the residents to do this.

Sounds like, well, unlike some other tech service providers, Time Warner Cable knows it needs to do the right thing. Hopefully they will get this taken care of quickly, without forcing someone who has suffered enough to jump through a bunch of red tape.