An East Cleveland woman claims a construction crew next door is to blame for cutting off her power and ruining all of her appliances.
Brenda Brown said everything in her home was working until the Cuyahoga Land Bank started demolition on an abandoned building next door, she said that's when she lost power and every appliance that was plugged in.
"The microwave burned out, washer and dryer burned out, TV burned out," explained Brown.
Brown said she contacted both the Illuminating Company and the Cuyahoga Land Bank and both said they did investigations and they were not responsible. "I know damage has been done," she said.
Brown said she watched the project get underway and then her power was disrupted. The Illuminating Company was able to restore power. "He said anything in a socket is damaged," said Brown.
Brown said she has been trying to get answers for weeks and that's why she reached out to News 5.
East Cleveland councilwoman Barbara Thomas is now involved. She said the city will have an electrician go to the property to look into the matter.
"We investigated the situation and it does not appear to be anything on our end that caused the problem," said The Illuminating Company spokesperson Mark Durbin.
The Cuyahoga Lank Bank issued this statement:
Our staff investigated the complaint the day we received it. Our insurance adjuster also investigated the site. The electric company reports that a transformer had failed at the owner's site on or before August 18th. The owner's complaint came to us on the 19th, the day the demolition of the adjacent property was scheduled . When we arrived at the site, the electricity had already been restored, but no entry onto the site by our contractor occurred because of fallen lines and lines sloping into the trees on the owner's property. It is therefore not possible that our contractor contributed to this loss. Our adjuster confirms that storms occurred during the week just prior to the outage, and that in fact a transformer had failed on our before August 18th. While we are always willing to give residents the benefit of the doubt where our contractors perform work on a site, it is not possible in good conscience to do so here when the contractor's equipment never entered the site. We regret the owner's temporary outage due to a transformer failure, but out adjuster indicated service was restored the day of the outage," said Gus Frangos with the Cuyahoga Land Bank.
