HOUSTON, Texas (KTRK) — Sandra Jucha is just one of thousands of Houstonians that lost power this week.
“I’m done,” Jucha said. “I’ve decided I’m not going to go through this anymore.”
Jucha said it took over 15 hours for her power to be restored.
“It’s just frustrating because yesterday they kept pushing back the restoration time, and it was a slap in the face that they released the press release that they’re hurricane ready, but we can’t even get through a storm,” Jucha said.
Jucha says for Hurricane Beryl she didn’t have power for eight days. She is now hoping CenterPoint Energy achieved their great Houston resiliency initiative so many Houstonians called for.
“When it happened, I was like, but you know what, CenterPoint said that they’ve done everything we need to do, that we’re ready, so I assumed that we would be back up and running right away and we weren’t,” Jucha said.
ABC13 took Jucha’s concerns to CenterPoint.
“I’d say that we’ve done a lot of work to be prepared for whatever storm that comes our way so whether it’s the storms like we saw Monday night, which we’re going to continue to have severe storms. So really, as I mentioned, we’ve done a lot of work to prepare for hurricane season,” Alyssa Oshodi with CenterPoint Energy said.
CenterPoint says while they had 167,000 customers in the dark. They’ve done work on their system to get the lights on in 24 hours.
“Immediately following Beryl, we had about six weeks that was phase one of that work. Just last week, we announced that we completed phase two, and some pieces of that phase two included replacing more than 25,000 poles with newer storm-resilient poles undergrounding more than 400 miles of power lines, installing automation devices on our system and completing several 1,000 miles of vegetation management,” Oshodi said.
But Jucha says for her, it’s not enough.
“I’m not looking forward to hurricane season. It’s just supposed to get worse and worse. And if this is any indication of what’s to come, I’m not sticking around for it,” Jucha said.
CenterPoint says already from this year compared to last year, they already have 20 million fewer minutes in outages.