Nine days after a deadly storm tore through northwest Indiana, roughly 68,000 customers remained without power as of Thursday, the majority in Lake County near the Illinois border, according to Northern Indiana Public Service Co. (NIPSCO). The utility has restored power to more than 306,500 customers since the August 11 storm, which it described as causing “unprecedented and widespread” destruction, but for the tens of thousands still waiting, this week has meant spoiled refrigerators, generators run for carbon monoxide risk, and a search for anywhere with electricity to charge a phone or a medical device.
“We’re always in survival mode in Gary,” hair stylist Shatiya Hardin told NPR. “It’s not OK for us to continually be in survival mode.” Community organizer Kevin Mejia said the need has been constant: “If I make one post, I get 500 comments. A lot of people have been reaching out to me for food.” Gary’s public school district, serving about 4,300 students, has been closed since August 13 and remains shut through at least Friday. Portage Township Schools postponed its entire start of the academic year, now targeting August 25, citing downed trees and property damage that still needs repair.
Nine Days Is the Number That Should Alarm People
A day or two without power after a bad storm is an inconvenience most people have lived through. Nine days, with crews from across the country brought in to help and still not finished, is a different category of failure, one that raises real questions about the state of Indiana’s grid infrastructure heading into a period of increasingly severe storms. NIPSCO’s own description of the damage as “unprecedented” cuts both ways: it may genuinely have been an extraordinary storm, but “unprecedented” storms are becoming a lot less rare across the Midwest, and a grid that takes over a week to recover from one isn’t built for the frequency these events are now happening at.
The Part That Doesn’t Show Up in Outage Counts
NIPSCO’s restoration numbers measure customers reconnected, not the compounding cost of nine days without power: the spoiled groceries a family on a tight budget can’t easily replace, the missed work for hourly employees without power to get ready for a shift, the school days lost that ripple into working parents needing childcare they didn’t budget for. Community hub director Raydia Martin put it simply: “We thrive best on certainty and predictability.” A ninth day without power is the opposite of that, for thousands of households at once.
NIPSCO says it expects full restoration, including in Gary, by Tuesday. For residents who’ve already gone more than a week, that’s still another five days of waiting on a promise the utility has already had to revise once.
What do you think? Does a nine-day outage after one storm point to a genuine infrastructure problem, or was this simply an unusually severe event that any grid would have struggled with? Let us know your thoughts in the comments on BeezLoop.com!
