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Gary Indiana power outage: Over 25,000 without electricity as residents slam NIPSCO; 'Every day I'm crying'
More than a week after deadly storms, thousands in Gary, Indiana are still without power.
Residents in Gary, Indiana, are growing increasingly desperate as power outages stretch on for more than a week following deadly storms, with grocery shelves empty, insulin spoiling, and people on oxygen unable to use their tanks.
How many people are still without power?
As per the latest outage tracker data, 25,830 homes and businesses are currently without power in Lake County, Indiana. That's 12.58 percent of the 205,249 customers tracked in the county. Lake County currently ranks 1st for total power outages and 1st for percentage of customers affected among all 92 counties in Indiana.
The utility, Northern Indiana Public Service Co. (NIPSCO), said on Friday that 43,400 of its customers remain without power in the region, down from more than 300,000 in the storm's immediate aftermath.
Service is expected to be restored to Gary by Tuesday, the company said, calling it a "monumental undertaking," as per The New York Times.
What happened in Gary
Electricity has been out for 10 days throughout much of Gary since deadly storms tore through the area, knocking down trees and power lines. On Friday, residents said they were growing increasingly desperate, even as another round of rain was on the way.
"Every day I'm crying," Renita Theus, 41, told The New York Times outside her darkened apartment, where her car remained trapped under a fallen tree. “It's hot in the house. I toss and turn and can't sleep. I walked to the dollar store and they're all out of candles and batteries.”
Storms on August 11 caused flooding and havoc throughout the Chicago area and neighboring northern Indiana, hitting Gary especially hard, where one-third of residents live in poverty, as per the report.
The powerful winds that hit Gary were part of a derecho, a series of strong thunderstorms that lasted for several hours and moved from eastern Iowa through Northern Illinois, Chicago and into Indiana. The strongest wind gust in Gary reached 99 miles per hour, said Brett Borchardt, a senior meteorologist with the National Weather Service office in Romeoville, Illinois.
Residents file lawsuit, react on social media
On Friday, several residents filed a class-action lawsuit against NIPSCO, accusing it of failing to proactively trim trees that toppled onto power lines and caused outages, as per The New York Times.
In a video shared on X, a resident said: “They are NIPSCO, everybody pays them. We don't pay, we get cut off, but when disaster happens, they want to charge us X amount of dollars, but we are already paying it to them, they get billions and trillions of dollars day to day, we working day to day on paychecks. So yes, they could've did it better. They got the money.....I can't afford a generator, I am working on a monthly salary, so therefore we need them. Either give us generators or get this power up running.”
Officials from the Public Service Co said the storm was extraordinarily large and destructive. “This storm caused unprecedented and widespread damage across our electric system,” the utility said in a statement. “Thousands of individual repairs must be completed before service can be fully restored.”
