Pennsylvania woman gets $284 billion electric bill

Dec. 24 (UPI) -- A Pennsylvania woman checked her electric bill earlier this month and found she owed more than $28 billion.

Mary Horomanski had to wonder if Penelec, her electric company, raised their rates when she found her balance for November was $284,460,000,000.

"If I'm not mistaken, it's probably higher then the national debt," Horomanski wrote in a Facebook post on Dec. 15., adding: "So if we sell everything we own & then some just maybe in 100 years it just may be paid off."

Horomanski contacted the Erie Times-News to let them know about the shock bill.

"My eyes just about popped out of my head," she told the paper.

Turned out, the Horomanski household didn't run up an electric bill greater than the GDP of most states.

Mark Durbin, a spokesman for Penelec, said a decimal point was probably put in the wrong place. "I can't recall ever seeing a bill for billions of dollars," Durbin said. "We appreciate the customer's willingness to reach out to us about the mistake."

But until the error was figured out, Horomanski wondered if maybe her family was at fault.

"We had put up Christmas lights and I wondered if we had put them up wrong," she said.