This story originally appeared on Houston Public Media.
Sienna Plantation, a huge planned community southwest of Houston, covers 16 square miles in Fort Bend County and is home to over 20,000 people.
Denise Selbst is one of the residents. On a rainy day last week, she invited us into her spacious two-story home where everything looks pretty normal. Except, that is, in her kitchen. The little clocks on her oven and microwave are blank.
“All my ovens, microwaves, they start flashing, I don’t even bother setting them.”
Selbst said she doesn’t reset the clocks because she says, “What’s the point?” The electricity will likely go out at any moment.
“It went off yesterday. I’m surprised it hasn’t gone out today yet. But normally when it rains, it goes out,” Selbst said. “It’s a constant problem; it will go out at least, at least three times a month if not more.”
A mile away lives another Sienna Plantation resident, Debra Maddow. She told us virtually the exact same story.
“They said, ‘Oh it’s the trees; Oh it’s the lightning’ — on days it was perfectly sunny over the summer — when we had clearly no storms or anything like that,” said Maddow.
She says she suspects what’s causing the outages has less to do with natural causes and more to do with Centerpoint’s design for the subdivision’s power grid.
“It seems to me they did not anticipate or prepare for the build-out of such a large community when they put in the power,” Maddow told Houston Public Media.
Maddow and other residents say the outages are not only a nuisance, they say power surges are damaging their appliances.
So, what’s going on here? Is it a place where the supply of electrical power can’t keep up with the growth of so many new houses, schools and strip centers?
“We are certainly aware of customer concerns out there,” said Alicia Dixon, a spokesperson for Centerpoint Energy, the Houston-based company that maintains the wires and poles.
Dixon said there’s nothing wrong with the design of the system, it’s what’s around it.
“It’s a community that has lots of vegetation. It’s a beautiful community. And with trees unfortunately come outages,” Dixon told Houston Public Media.
Dixon says trees are growing fast with all the rain last year, causing branches to hit electrical lines which then shorts out the system for a second. She says the power usually comes back on as the system “resets” but can stay off if a tree branch actually brings down a power line. She also says squirrels can get zapped and cause outages and woodpeckers can damage poles so badly they eventually have to be replaced.
So Dixon says Centerpoint is doing more tree-trimming, more inspections, and is installing barriers on poles to stop the squirrels and woodpeckers.
“We are taking action; we will continue to take action to try to improve the reliability out there.”
But there is skepticism Centerpoint can fix the problem. Sienna Plantation is the creation of Houston’s Johnson Development Corporation, one of nation’s leaders in master-planned communities. In a statement to us, Johnson Development said Centerpoint has, quote, “no real plan or timetable for a solution.” The developer said it was extremely frustrated by this and said its greatest concern was that about a third of the outages in the last couple of years had no known cause.
Homeowners have complained about all this to the Public Utility Commission of Texas. It regulates Centerpoint and approves its rates which the PUC says include the costs for doing maintenance like trimming trees.
The PUC told us it’s investigating the complaints. But in a letter to the residents a few months ago, the PUC said Centerpoint hadn’t broken any rules and it suggested that if residents felt the power outages had damaged appliances, they should hire an attorney and take Centerpoint to court.
Homeowner Denise Selbst said she has little faith the PUC will do much more.
“They’re done with it for now. But I think if we continue to complain we’ll get some resolution,” Selbst said.
