During a Texas House committee hearing in Austin on Wednesday morning, CenterPoint Energy's CEO, Jason Wells, vowed that his company would do better in maintaining vegetation near its power lines.
However, a Rosenberg woman reached out to ABC13 after struggling to get CenterPoint to remediate damaged trees on their easement, leaning over her fence and drooping into her backyard.
Nancy Schmidt said she lost power from Hurricane Beryl and decided to leave her house after the third day of outages. When her electricity was restored on July 12, she returned home to a yard littered with tree branches that CenterPoint crews had left behind. She said that her yard didn't have any trees in it before.
SEE ALSO: Texas lawmakers demand CenterPoint customers not pay $800M generator bill after fiery hearing
Schmidt said CenterPoint wouldn't accept debris reports for another week, and when they finally did, she said the earliest appointment was a month out. When she asked for a sooner date, she was given the phone number of their forester, but she said he had yet to answer the phone or return any of her messages.
"I didn't feel like it was safe to come into my backyard. I have dogs and grandchildren who come over to play," she said. "I would hate for anybody else to have to go through this. I'm sure I'm not the only one."
Her son has cleaned up some of the branches in the yard on his own, but she said the damaged trees will need to be handled by a professional. What concerns her the most is that if another wind storm or hurricane comes through, the leaning trees could knock out their power again or cause a fire by the power lines.
"To me, at this point, it feels like they think, 'Oh, they'll stop calling. We're not going to answer and then they will have to clean it up themselves,'" Schmidt said. "It's discouraging because it is their responsibility to keep their part of the bargain. If I refuse to pay CenterPoint, that wouldn't fly with them. So why should we be put in this situation?"
RELATED: Texas lawmakers grill CenterPoint in senate committee about Hurricane Beryl response
On Wednesday, Wells told lawmakers that freezes from 2022 and the drought in 2023 led to higher risks of tree failure. He said CenterPoint increased their vegetation management budget by 30%, taking that money from their profits.
He acknowledged that their efforts were insufficient and that more could've been done, given what their customers experienced after Hurricane Beryl. As of July 16, CenterPoint doubled its vegetation workforce to attack the 2,000 riskiest miles of vegetation before the end of the year.
CenterPoint has yet to respond to ABC13's request for comment regarding Schmidt's case or questions about how far back its backlog is for debris calls.
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