Nearly two weeks after a storm with winds up to 99 mph tore through northwest Indiana, tens of thousands of households remain without electricity, and utility crews say some residents will not see power restored until Tuesday. The Aug. 11 storm splintered roughly 300 utility poles and 44 transmission structures across Lake County, according to Northern Indiana Public Service Company, which has called the damage "unprecedented and widespread."
At the peak of the outage, more than 370,000 customers lost power. By Aug. 20, NIPSCO had restored service to more than 306,500 of them, but roughly 68,000 customers — many in Gary, a city whose school district serves about 4,300 students — were still in the dark on what residents and reporters described as the ninth consecutive day without electricity. Gary's school district closed Aug. 13 and has yet to fully reopen, and more than 20,000 residents have lined up at community centers for hot meals, water and a place to charge phones.
NIPSCO says it has brought in more than 600 linemen from outside the region to speed repairs, and the utility's restoration timeline points to full service in Gary by 11:59 p.m. Tuesday — two full weeks after the storm hit. Gary Mayor Eddie Melton has acknowledged residents' frustration and exhaustion while crediting the expanded crews with accelerating the work. Indiana Gov. Mike Braun has announced $5,000 relief grants for families affected by the outage, and federal officials approved an emergency declaration for the state covering the storm response.
It's not OK for us to continually be in survival mode.
Shatiya Hardin, Gary resident
The prolonged outage has drawn attention to the vulnerability of the region's above-ground grid and to the strain repeated extended outages put on lower-income households in particular, many of which lack the means to relocate or run backup generators for more than a week at a stretch. Resilience researchers have noted that outages of this length are unusual for the Midwest outside of major hurricanes or ice storms, and that heat during the outage's first several days added to the danger for elderly residents and those with medical equipment dependent on electricity.
With Gary's schools among the last major institutions still shuttered, Portage Township Schools nearby are also not expected to resume classes until Aug. 25, matching NIPSCO's restoration deadline. Utility officials say they do not expect further storms to complicate the timeline this week, but residents who have already waited more than a week past the initial outage say they will believe full restoration when the lights actually come back on.
