GARY, Ind. — For nearly two weeks, Melissa Dixon tried to keep her Gary home running without electricity.
She bought fuel for a generator. She lost the food in her refrigerator and freezer. She said her vehicle was damaged driving through floodwaters.
“We are here in Gary suffering,” Dixon told the Chicago Sun-Times. “Why is this okay?”
Her family was among thousands affected after a powerful Aug. 11 derecho devastated Northwest Indiana. The storm produced a 99 mph wind gust at Gary/Chicago International Airport, according to the National Weather Service.
The winds uprooted trees, snapped utility poles and brought down electrical lines across the region.
Northern Indiana Public Service Co., or NIPSCO, described the storm as the largest outage event in its history. More than 300,000 customers initially lost electricity.
But the blackout stretched well into a second week for parts of Gary, a predominantly Black city where many households have limited financial resources to absorb a disaster.
“Our power. This should have never went on so long,” Dixon said.
Black Gary families count the cost
About 76% of Gary residents are Black, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The city’s poverty rate is 33.1%, while median household income is $38,731.
Those numbers matter during an extended blackout.
Generators require fuel. Hotel rooms cost money. Refrigerators filled with groceries can become a total loss. Businesses without backup electricity can lose days of revenue.
Dixon said that keeping her generator running eventually exhausted the money she had available.
“Me and my kids, we have lost all our food,” Dixon said. “I have exhausted all my funds trying to keep my generator going.”
Other Gary residents and businesses have faced similar costs.
Joslyn Kelly, owner of J’s Breakfast Club, said that her restaurant went eight days without electricity. She estimated losing about $19,000 in sales.
At Koney King, owner Jimmy Hendricks spent about $1,300 on a generator to keep his restaurant operating. Residents also used the business to charge their devices.
Dixon questioned the imbalance between what utilities require from customers and what residents can expect when service disappears for days.
“Any other time when we’re struggling and we can’t make ends meet, we can’t pay our NIPSCO bill and utility, NIPSCO get cut off,” she said. “Why is this okay?”
Questions grow over NIPSCO maintenance
The derecho was extraordinary. Winds approaching 100 mph can cause catastrophic damage even to well-maintained electrical systems.
Still, the destruction has prompted questions about whether infrastructure conditions and vegetation management worsened the outages.
A lawsuit seeking class-action status accuses NIPSCO of failing to adequately maintain vegetation around electrical lines before the storm. The case was filed by a Porter County resident who alleges the outage forced her to postpone surgery for a fractured hip.
NIPSCO disputes allegations that it neglected vegetation management. The utility says it has increased spending on that work since 2016.
The company has also rejected suggestions that restoration decisions were based on the racial or economic makeup of affected communities.
The consequences of a prolonged outage can fall differently on communities depending on household income and available resources. In Gary, roughly one-third of residents live below the poverty line.
Dixon said residents were struggling to understand why restoration had taken so long.
“No one actually can really explain why we’re going through it,” Dixon said.
Gary mayor pushes NIPSCO for answers
Gary Mayor Eddie Melton also criticized the restoration timeline and NIPSCO’s communication with the city.
Melton said he had to push NIPSCO for more specific information after Gary was initially missing from community restoration estimates.
“I had to demand that NIPSCO provide more accurate restoration times specifically for Gary because the information that was shared was omitting Gary,” Melton said.
NIPSCO later set an Aug. 25 target for full restoration in Gary.
The utility has said crews faced extensive damage requiring thousands of individual repairs. Restoration work in Gary also temporarily stopped Aug. 15 after gunfire struck a NIPSCO vehicle. Crews later returned with additional security.
Indiana Gov. Mike Braun declared a statewide disaster emergency Aug. 13. Federal officials also approved emergency assistance supporting response and recovery efforts.
For Dixon, however, the disaster is measured in what her family lost while waiting for electricity.
Despite flood damage, spoiled food and days without lights, she said that she remained grateful that her family could stay in their home.
“I’m thankful that I can, even though I have some flood damage, no food, no lights, I can stay in my own home,” Dixon said. “There’s other people that can’t.”
Restoring electricity will not immediately replace Gary families’ spoiled groceries, recover businesses’ lost revenue or replenish money spent keeping generators running.
And after nearly two weeks of hardship, Dixon’s question remains:
“Why is this okay?”
