Midtown drivers still traveling under leaning power pole: 'Definitely a hazard'

HOUSTON, Texas (KTRK) -- Thursday's thunderstorm sent power poles crashing down across Houston. Still, some people are sounding the alarm about the poles that were only partially displaced.

At Webster and Crawford streets in Midtown, residents said they called CenterPoint Energy to report a power pole leaning precariously over the street as cars and trucks continued to pass underneath it.

"It's gonna come down," Patricia Collins, who manages Urban Tales pet kennel across the street, said. "Maybe another strong gust or someone catching that wire, and it's gonna come down."

CenterPoint told reporters it's encouraging people to make them aware of leaning power poles. But Friday afternoon, long after the leaning pole was reported, no one had been by to fix it, and the road hadn't been blocked off.

"You would think that something like that would be a priority. You would think that because that's definitely a hazard," Collins said.

Collins gave Eyewitness News a tour of Urban Tales, which, like many businesses and homes in the area, is still without electricity.

"It's humid. I mean, there's no air movement at all. You've got to think; we're a concrete building, so there's no airflow whatsoever," she said.

In northeast Houston, Thursday's storm brought down a building on a lane of the feeder road at the I-610 North Loop and Homestead Road.

In a nearby neighborhood, Justin Swain spent the day chopping up the fallen trees in his parents' yard.
"These trees are really tall and really old so once they come down and you get to chopping them up, it seems like it's a million pieces," Swain said.

The winds flattened the two buildings that made up Miller & Son Wrecker Service along the Eastex Freeway at Crosstimbers Street.

"Thirty years of hard work gone down the drain," owner Terri Miller-Wilkerson said.

Miller-Wilkerson added that her employees left work early Thursday to avoid the storm, so no one was on-site at the time.

The winds flipped over one of the trucks in her lot, and debris from another business was blown across the freeway.

"I was really concerned about the people driving on the freeway. I'm pretty sure it was over their heads," Miller-Wilkerson said.

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