The Lights Are Back On in Gary, Indiana

Last night, NIPSCO, an Indiana utility company that provides electricity to half a million people in the northern part of the state, finally made the deadline for restoring power to the city of Gary.

On August 11, a derecho swept across northwest Indiana, and winds nearing 100 miles an hour knocked out power for more than 370,000 people, NIPSCO has said.

In Gary, home to nearly 70,000 people, 75 percent of them Black, more than half of the utility’s customers lost power in the initial aftermath of the storm.

For the next two weeks, NIPSCO kept pushing back its timeline for restoring power; even on Monday, thousands in Gary were still in the dark.

As of yesterday evening, the utility said, it had restored power to 99 percent of its customers—which also meant that hundreds of people in Gary still didn’t have electricity this morning.

Blackouts follow plenty of storms, and at a press conference eight days after the storm hit, Gary Mayor Eddie Melton described the ongoing blackout as a situation for “not just Gary” but also all of northwest Indiana.

However, as the days of darkness stretched on, and the power started going back in other parts of the region—first Dyer and East Chicago, then Hobart and Merrillville—the initial inconvenience of a Tuesday, a Wednesday, then a Thursday, then a Friday without power started to become a crisis in Gary.

This past weekend, Melton was no longer talking about the blackout as a regional problem.

Gary, he told me, had not initially been on NIPSCO’s schedule for restoring power and had seemingly been overlooked until the city pushed back.

NIPSCO declined to comment on the specifics of its restoration schedule, but a spokesperson wrote in a statement that it had hired extra contractors and drawn on support from neighboring utilities and that “no outage is being overlooked.” The people I spoke with in Gary felt differently—that whatever efforts had been made to restore power had not been fast enough.

They described throwing out maggot-filled food from their refrigerators, and temporarily moving in with friends and family members who had generators.

They were charging their phones in their cars while running the air-conditioning just to stay cool in the summer heat.

Gary’s median household income is about $40,000 a year; nearly 20 percent of its people are 65 or older, according to the latest U.S. census data—it’s a community with limited money to spare.

People were spending their last dollars on gas to drive through the city on roads without functional streetlights—past uprooted trees, fallen street signs, and loose power lines—just to find supplies.