Utility sued by injured reporter
Man burned when rescue boat tangled with live power lines
A reporter for a London newspaper wrote a harrowing account last year about how he and a photographer were burned by live power lines and forced to cling to a tree for nearly 24 hours after an attempted rescue mission they had accompanied ended tragically with the deaths of four volunteers.
A year later, the reporter, Alan Butterfield, has sued CenterPoint Energy for the burns and other injuries he received when the rescue boat tangled with downed power lines, killing all but three of the seven people on board. Butterfield, a reporter with the Daily Mail who lives in Salt Lake City, accused CenterPoint of failing to shut off electricity in the neighborhoods along Greens Bayou, which was flooded by Hurricane Harvey, according to the lawsuit filed Monday in state district court in Harris County.
The group was headed to rescue a wheelchair-bound resident when they encountered the downed power lines. CenterPoint spokeswoman Alejandra Diaz said the utility would not comment.
At least one other lawsuit has
been filed for deaths caused by power lines knocked down during the record-breaking storm. In May, the family of Andrew Pasek, 25, sued Center Point and two other companies for a total of $1 million, alleging that the power should have been cut off to the live wires. Pasek was electrocuted on Aug. 29, 2017, as he stepped through the high water in a Spring Branch-area neighborhood.
Butterfield, 55, came to Houston to cover Hurricane Harvey, which had been expected to cause widespread damage. On Monday, Aug. 28, three days after Harvey made landfall and covered the Houston area in water, Butterfield and photographer Ruaridh Connellan were on the east side of Houston.
They asked a group of five men with an older motorboat if the journalists could come along to film a water rescue of a wheelchair-bound resident along Greens Bayou, according to Butterfield’s account published by the Daily Mail. The volunteers agreed.
The mission was one of hundreds that Houstonians with boats launched to rescue flooded residents stuck in their homes as the hurricane dumped more than 50 inches of rain. Many of the grateful residents who were rescued were families with children and pets and elderly people who sent out calls of distress on social media that water was rising and there was no place to go.
Butterfield said in the lawsuit that the volunteers were only about 10 minutes into their mission when they saw disaster looming. The boat was heading straight toward submerged power lines that were sparking. The electricity knocked out the engine, making the boat difficult to maneuver, according to the lawsuit. The group tried to turn the boat around, but the current was too strong.
Everyone jumped out and Butterfield wrote that the electricity coursing through the water initially paralyzed him. He was able to grab on to a dinghy attached to the motorboat and reach a tree, along with Connellan and volunteer Jose Vizueth. For nearly 24 hours, according to the lawsuit, they shouted and tried to attract attention as they clung to branches. But the torrential rain and heavy winds made them invisible to rescuers.
“The water smelled putrid — like stagnant sewage, mixed with everything else,” Butterfield wrote in his account the day after he was rescued. “There was heavy rain on us all night, and I was trying to catch drops in my mouth to get some water.”
Butterfield has scarring on his legs and stomach and damaged ligaments in his shoulder, caused by the hours he spent clinging to the tree, said his Houston lawyer Muhammad Aziz. Butterfield spent more than a week in the hospital after he was rescued, battling burns and an infection from the water.
“Given the re-occurrence of flooding in Houston,” Aziz said, “I think Center Point needs to come up with a solid plan and strategy for things like this in the future so people don’t get electrocuted.”
The accident killed volunteer rescuers Jorge Raul Perez, 33, and 25-year-old Yahir Rubio-Vizueth, as well as Gustavo Rodriguez, 40, and Benjamin Vizueth, 33, whose bodies were later found on the banks of Greens Bayou.
In the lawsuit, Butterfield accused Center Point of negligence for failing to take reasonable care to ensure it shut off power to the area during the hurricane. Butterfield is seeking unspecified damages.