HOUSTON -- While many in the Houston area are still hoping for the basic comforts of electricity, others have hardly been inconvenienced by the devastation of Hurricane Ike.

Now, some are questioning whether wealthy neighborhoods are getting special treatment and having their power come back faster, KPRC Local 2 reported Thursday.

So far, 916,000 CenterPoint Energy customers have had power restored since the storm came through late Friday. But 1.23 million are still without.

While diners at Chuy's in the Upper Kirby area sipped on margaritas, families in Cypress sat in the dark. It's a power struggle between two communities, and some in Cypress said CenterPoint pulled the plug right out from under them.

"That's, that's just not right," resident Kathy McGuire said.

McGuire said it's not right that CenterPoint Energy pulled crews restoring power in her Cypress subdivision to send them to Bellaire and River Oaks.

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But a CenterPoint insider told residents who live there, and KPRC Local 2, that it's exactly what happened.

"The pole climbers had their gear on. They were getting ready to go up the pole. They were stopped and they said they were redirected to go immediately to Bellaire," Marvin Herman said.

Homeowners said the same trucks and crews had been in their neighborhood for several days.

Then, at about 8:30 a.m. Thursday, they started packing up their equipment to leave five blocks short of restoring power to the entire neighborhood.

"Oh, I was ready to cry, you know. But I'm thinking, 'Well, it's probably a lot of expensive homes and stuff that they want. Somebody's yelling loud they want power,'" McGuire said.

Just a few hours later, KPRC Local 2 found those trucks originally assigned to the Timberlakes Estates subdivision restoring power on the corner of Kirby Drive and Kipling.

The CenterPoint insider said crews wanted to stay in Cypress and had only hours left until they finished that job.

"I think it's crap. You know, we're -- Bellaire's got water and sewer. We're out here ... everybody out here's on wells and septic. We don't have anything. If you don't have a generator out here, you're screwed," resident Ken Turner said.

CenterPoint Energy told KPRC by phone that it is not unusual that the crew was dispatched to a new location even though the neighborhood was not fully restored.

The energy company said it has to send crews to areas where it can get the greatest number of people back online in the shortest period of time. Sometimes that means small patches of some areas are in the dark a little longer.

"They were out in the area, and they should have finished their job. They shouldn't have gone off and left us like this," Shelly Johnson said.

The CenterPoint spokeswoman did not look up the scenario in Timberlake Estates to find out exactly what directions crews in that area were given. She just gave KPRC an explanation that she said is likely what happened in this case.