CYPRESS, Texas — Cypress has been home for Brett and Joyce Basford for decades but recently they've noticed their power going on and off.
“It’s just frustrating," said Joyce Basford, a CenterPoint Energy customer.
Frustrating because the machine they use to sleep needs power.
“I’ll tell you, the main thing it was, getting woken up by the CPAP going off,” said Brett Basford.
The Basford's looked at their data and found more than 30 times in the past six months they’ve had some sort of outage.
“It’s a good hour and a half before we get everything done and settled back down," said Joyce.
They’re not alone. KHOU 11 has heard from more than a dozen neighbors in three zip codes.
“We are paying for a service and we are not being delivered that service,” said Brett.
We asked CenterPoint last week and this week for an interview. Both times they said no one was available. So, we took customers' questions to KHOU 11’s energy expert Ed Hirs.
“CenterPoint has been tagged in the past for not providing reliable service," said Hirs.
Last week, CenterPoint blamed buzzards for the power outages. However, this week they told us that problem had been resolved in a statement:
"We are committed to serving our customers safely and reliably, and we apologize for any inconveniences they may be experiencing. With respect to the wildlife issue that was interfering with one of our transmission lines, our work to address it has been completed. Any short interruptions in service that customers may be experiencing are not related to transmission issues; they may be the result of the tree interference with our power lines that we highlighted in our previous comments. We are currently conducting tree trimming in high-priority locations to improve reliability and plan to continue to trim the remainder of the circuit over the next several weeks."
“It’s a problem for Houston, it’s a problem for Texas, it’s a problem for the nation, we have just not invested enough in keeping the electricity infrastructure up to date,” said Hirs.
The Basfords said they’ve tried calling CenterPoint themselves.
“The front line people, they don’t have any answers, they are reading from a script of this is what you tell people when they call in," said Joyce.
In the meantime, they have a box full of supplies ready for when the power goes out in the middle of the night.
“I just would like to see some progress and see it fixed," said Brett.
To see more information on where CenterPoint outages have been reported, click here.