Houstonians without power were getting back to normal when moving truck knocked lines down a second time

HOUSTON, Texas (KTRK) — A group of townhomes in the Houston Museum District are dealing with a second round of power outages, but this time it isn’t due to weather.

Residents on Barkdull Street told ABC13 that a week after their lights came back on, a moving company knocked them out again.

“The wire was captured by the top of the truck and then wrapped underneath the hitch area of the truck,” Wayne Thompson, who lives nearby, said.

Thompson took a cellphone video showing the mangled mess and the snapped utility pole caused by the crash.

The 18-wheeler belongs to Bravo Moving Company. A spokesperson told ABC13 that their driver got caught in low-hanging power lines.

As a result, some residents are back to where they were when Beryl hit – in the dark.

“It is frustrating because we thought everything was back to normal, status quo, everybody brought their pets back inside and started buying groceries again, and here this comes, and we have no power,” Jenni Koetting said.

ABC13 spotted CenterPoint installing a new utility pole, but Koetting said they didn’t restore power. According to CenterPoint, the broken connection allegedly goes beyond what they’re responsible for.

Koetting was told she has to pay an electrician to fix it.

“Anything this side of the pole, even if those lines were too low, is on us,” Koetting said.

This is an issue many Houstonians are dealing with after the storm: outages that, unbeknownst to them, are the damage to the infrastructure of their homes.

“We would’ve expected that all this would’ve be restored by CenterPoint or the moving company,” Koetting said.

Koetting said three others on her street are without power that she knows of.

An electrician has already been by and told them repairs will likely cost upwards of $1,000 per home. Once those repairs are done, CenterPoint can handle the rest.

“We’ll go back on their cue, and they’ll come back and restore our power,” Koetting said, adding that fears she and her neighbors’ place in that queue is likely at the end. “All of the neighbors that are out of power have pets. Our concern is that it could be a dangerous situation for the pets if they stay inside, as well as ourselves if it gets too hot.”

The moving company said their truck obviously sustained major damage, for which they hope to file an insurance claim. But they say their driver in this situation was not at fault, given low clearance from the lines.

Koetting said her homeowner insurance reps told her they do not cover “power.”

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