Houston residents frustrated with CenterPoint dining updates

HOUSTON — Residents in northwest Houston are still dealing with lingering issues from last week’s deadly storms.

The problem? There is still no electricity, which means there is nowhere to eat. Establishments that were open, like Little Caesars, had to stop taking orders because they were running out of dough.

Neighbors are frustrated as they say they continue to receive poor information from CenterPoint when it comes to power restoration estimates.

RELATED: CenterPoint releases searchable map for power restoration updates, but some question accuracy

The lights are still out in the Oaks of Inwood subdivision. Joseph, a U.S. Army veteran, said he has been without power since last Thursday.

“The power went out, and then it came back on, and after that it completely went out,” he said.

Without air conditioning, the temperature in her house kept rising. It’s hot, but Joseph gets through it.

“I’m in the military, so I can do what I want how I want, so these things don’t affect me. But I live with it, we live with our daughter,” he said.

When he called CenterPoint Monday to get a status update, he was told his power had been restored. He had to tell the customer service representative that this was not the case. The representative told him to check his house’s circuit breaker, which he did, but the power still wasn’t on.

“For some reason, where they were getting their information from was giving them the indication that we were under tension,” he said.

Logan Anderson is a Senior Communications Specialist for CenterPoint Energy. He had a few answers that might explain the misunderstanding.

RELATED: Many of you told us the CenterPoint Energy map isn’t accurate. Here’s what CenterPoint told us.

“If a customer considers themselves recovered and they are not yet, or if they do not see themselves represented on the map at all, this does not mean that we are not aware of your outage and that we’re not solving your problem,” Anderson said. said. “Our website was getting 700,000 hits per hour, so it wasn’t able to maintain that level of attention and the website crashed.”

Anderson admitted it hasn’t been easy to provide the correct information to customers during the extended outage.

“When our system experiences significant damage, that means those communications can become a little more spotty,” she said.

Joseph wasn’t the only one having difficulty getting accurate updates. Many Houstonians reported receiving incorrect information about their power status when they entered their address into CenterPoint’s map search feature.

“Now we have our searchable map and it’s even more granular, but it’s not perfect,” Anderson said. “Customers registered for our electrical alert service can receive email notifications.”

Neighbor Kahn Grice was registered with the alert service, but the information he received Monday morning was still false.

RELATED: Power outage update | CenterPoint Releases New Maps of Estimated Restoration Days

“I didn’t understand why I received the email that power had been restored,” Grice said. “We have no power. We look at the CenterPoint map and they say power will be restored tomorrow, however, somehow their system shows power has been restored.”

The email even explained that its outage was caused by fallen trees.

Anderson said a significant number of customers have had their power restored, but Grice doesn’t believe it.

“80%, 85%, or those numbers that they’re reporting, those numbers are skewed,” Grice said.

He worries that the electricity provider is counting his neighborhood in those numbers, even if the lights haven’t been turned back on yet.

“We feel like we’ve been kind of forgotten,” Grice said.