Pacific Palisades homeowner turns to 7 On Your Side after receiving no mail for weeks

PACIFIC PALISADES, Calif. (KABC) -- First she lost her home in the Palisades fires. Now, while trying to rebuild her life, Nicole Hausman was thrown another problem.

Her mail has been missing for weeks. So she turned to 7 On Your Side to get help.

"There are a lot of moments where it just feels kind of hopeless - like will I ever be able to piece it all back together?" said Hausman. "Checks mailed to us directly from our insurance company have not reached us."

Right after Hausman lost her home and everything inside of it, she went to a

Packager and mail store in Woodland Hills and rented a P.O. box.

After going inside a US Postal Service post office and filling out a change of address form, USPS delivered to her new P.O. Box a confirmation of address change.

But for weeks nothing else from USPS was delivered, according to Hausman. "I have not received a single piece of mail," she said.

A man who lost his family-owned gas station in the Palisades Fire wants to build affordable housing in its place, but it's being met with concerns.

So 7 on Your Side reached out to USPS. At first, a USPS spokesperson told us the address provided by Hausman was not the same address as where the P.O. Box is located.

"Based on the information you provided, it has been determined the address provided by Nicole Hausman, to the Postal Service, is not the same address provided in your email," said USPS Strategic Communication Specialist Natashi Garvins.

ABC7 asked USPS how that's even possible since the one piece of mail USPS did deliver to that P.O. Box is the confirmation of address change, that has the correct address of the mail and package store.

Hausman says she then got a call from USPS.

"What I have now come to understand is that at some point, someone was alerted to an error from however the address was formatted in the system and that someone changed our address."

After further investigating, Garvins told 7 On your Side that Nicole's P.O. Box number wasn't in the USPS computer system.

"Although the national Change of Address division acknowledged the address change to the customer via the confirmation letter (new addresses are created daily which unfortunately do not come through internally), the system attempted to create and request verification of the new address, but it was never received," said Garvins.

"When the verification didn't occur, the system attempted to correct the address and matched it to the closet address representing all the other components of the address."

Hausman says she finds this answer from USPS very frustrating.

"I wasn't notified when the address was changed to a completely different street," said Hausman.

USPS says the problem has now been corrected and Hausman started to get mail at her P.O. Box.

"Thank you for your help," said Hausman. "It is incredibly frustrating as an end user, as a consumer of the US Postal Service that we were unable to get any answers without your help."