Thousands Still Without Power in Gary, Indiana 12 Days After Severe Storms

Nearly two weeks after a severe storm hit Gary, Indiana, tens of thousands of people are still living without electricity. The storm struck on August 11 and brought strong winds, flooding, and tornadoes to parts of the Midwest, including Chicago and Indiana. In Gary, wind gusts reached 99 miles per hour, and seven people were killed across the state. The outage has made daily life very hard for many residents, especially the elderly and those with health needs.

One Gary resident, Terry Dubois, is 77 years old and has been without power since the storm hit. She has been relying on friends to bring her food that does not need to be kept cold, and her son gave her a power bank to charge her phone. Dubois said the summer heat has not been too bad, so she has not missed her air conditioning too much. Still, she said she has never seen a storm like this one. 'It was like a sheer wall of wind,' she recalled.

The storm itself only lasted five to ten minutes, but its effects have lasted much longer. Since the storm, power has been restored to more than 345,000 customers. However, nearly 30,000 people were still without electricity as of Sunday morning, according to the local power company, Northern Indiana Public Service Company, known as Nipsco. In the first few days after the storm, gas stations, grocery stores, and pharmacies had no power, so people had to survive on whatever food and supplies they had at home.

Gary is a former industrial city on the southern shore of Lake Michigan, and about one-third of its roughly 70,000 residents live in poverty. The long power outage has hit this community especially hard, as residents have struggled to find food, keep clean, and stay safe. There have been reports of people unable to keep medicine cold, and a wheelchair user had to crawl down stairs because the elevator was not working. As the outage stretched into a second week, the food charity World Central Kitchen arrived to help people who did not have access to meals.

At night, some streets have been completely dark because the street lights are not working. Kyle Allen, a Gary resident who recently started caring for his 95-year-old father, bought a generator to keep them both safe. Shatiya Hardin said the situation has been 'absolutely horrible,' with families sweating at night and worrying about children and elderly people who need electricity for oxygen tanks. Faith leaders held a press conference outside a local church on Saturday, calling for faster help and saying, '12 days is long enough.'

Some residents have filed a class-action lawsuit against Nipsco, accusing the company of failing to manage trees near power lines that fell during the storm. One resident, Jack Tipold, said he was in the middle of having his teeth removed when the power went out and was sent home without enough pain medicine. 'I had all my teeth removed, and no medication for 48 hours. Let me tell you something, it was a struggle,' he said. Nipsco denied wrongdoing and said it would fight the lawsuit in court.

Indiana Governor Mike Braun said there was 'no excuse for these delays' and asked FEMA to quickly approve a major disaster declaration for the area. He also pushed Nipsco to bring in more workers to speed up repairs, saying, 'Put every available resource into the field. Get creative.' Nipsco said it expected to have power fully restored to Gary by Wednesday. Experts warn that climate change is making storms like this more common, meaning outages like Gary's could happen more often in the future.