HOUSTON, Texas — A gas-powered generator helped keep Jennifer Law's townhome in east downtown Houston cool Monday as temperatures rose.
"It's about 50 to 70 dollars every day,” said Law. "We see CenterPoint trucks going by all day long, we think 'is it our turn, is it our turn?'”
Law lives near a CenterPoint facility but said her so-called “nested outage” will have to wait.
"They’ve pretty much told us that essentially we’re not a priority at this point because we don’t have enough people affected,” said Law.
Three of six units in her townhome complex, which also suffered wind damage, did not have power a week after Hurricane Beryl, along with one neighboring single-family home.
While they’re surrounded by others who do have power.
“I think what’s even more frustrating is it say we’re energized but we’re clearly not,” said Law.
Other CenterPoint customers across the Houston area seem to be in the same predicament. They're in pockets without power despite what the outage map may say.
“It’s kind of frustrating to be stuck without power and other people in your neighborhood do have it," said Pablo Jimenez in the Klein area,
He said he and his family, along with the same number of neighbors, went through the same thing after May’s straight-line windstorm.
Someone erected a sign Monday illustrating the predicament eight days following Beryl.
"A whole week without power saying we do have power and no one coming over here," said Jimenez. "There needs to be a system of some sort so we can report that better.”
We should note that power to his neighborhood in Klein was restored during our visit.
Meanwhile, KHOU 11 News got this statement from CenterPoint regarding ongoing outages:
There might be several reasons why some customers may have their power restored, while others nearby are still without power. One reason could be a nested outage, which occurs when, even after fixing the main issue, other isolated issues such as damage to fuses, transformers, meters, electric lines or other electric infrastructure cause continued outages in specific areas. These secondary issues can arise from unseen damage or overloaded systems.
Another reason could be that customers on the same street might be on different electric circuits. Customers on different circuits can experience varied restoration times because each circuit may have different levels of damage or may be repaired in a different sequence. This means that while one circuit is fully restored, another might still be undergoing repairs.
A customer who is still out on a circuit showing green might be experiencing a more localized issue. Customers enrolled in Power Alert Service are receiving individual restoration alerts as their power is restored. We continue to assess our system and update the information regularly. A circuit level outage generally includes locations with more than 100 customers impacted. If your grocery stores, streetlights and surrounding neighborhoods are without power, the problem may be at the circuit level.