GARY, INDIANA OUTAGE REVEALS YEARS OF UNANSWERED QUESTIONS

The August 11 derecho tore through Northwest Indiana with winds approaching 100 miles per hour and left Gary with extraordinary damage to its electrical system. More than 20,000 customers in the city were still without power more than a week later. NIPSCO reported that roughly 300 distribution poles and 44 transmission poles in Gary needed repair or replacement, and the company projected that some customers might remain without electricity until August 25. Gary is 76.2 percent Black, and about one-third of its residents live below the poverty line. Those residents spent the aftermath of the storm dealing with spoiled food, August heat, dead phones, lost refrigeration, disrupted medical equipment, damaged homes, and days of uncertainty about when electricity would return.

The storm landed on a city that had already spent years raising concerns about NIPSCO. Less than a month before the derecho, on July 15, the Gary Common Council held an official public forum called “Truth about Nipsco & Data Centers.” Years earlier, council members had opposed proposed NIPSCO rate increases because of the burden they would place on residents with low incomes and people living on fixed incomes. During the current outage, council members again described longstanding frustration with rates and service. Gary’s dispute with its electric utility was already part of the public record before the first pole fell on August 11.

Then Gary disappeared from NIPSCO’s restoration schedule. Other communities received estimated dates while Gary remained without one. Residents noticed immediately. Gary Councilwoman Lori Latham told the utility, “Don’t issue another list without Gary on it.” NIPSCO later added the city and assigned it one of the latest projected restoration dates in the affected region. The company attributed the delay to the extent of the physical destruction inside Gary, where transmission lines, distribution equipment, and hundreds of poles required extensive work. More than 600 linemen were working across the region. Mayor Eddie Melton described residents as “frustrated and exhausted” while crews continued repairs.

The physical damage was severe enough to account for a substantial portion of the delay. Portage and Munster, both predominantly white communities, also received late restoration dates. East Chicago, with large Black and Hispanic populations and high poverty, received an earlier estimate. The storm therefore did not produce a clean racial map in which every predominantly Black community waited while every predominantly white community recovered quickly. Gary still stands apart because of the scale and duration of its outage, the number of customers affected, and the condition of the infrastructure that had to be rebuilt.

That condition reaches beyond the storm itself. NIPSCO customers have paid for years of electrical-system improvements designed to increase reliability and resilience. Indiana regulators approved a multiyear transmission and distribution improvement program worth well over $1 billion. The Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission’s 2025 annual report lists NIPSCO’s 2021 through 2026 transmission, distribution, and storage improvement plan at approximately $1.489 billion, with roughly $938.5 million in approved investments to date. NIPSCO’s latest electric rate case also produced an annual revenue increase of approximately $257 million after settlement. Nearly 4,900 written consumer comments entered that proceeding, and public hearings were held in Gary, Hammond, and Valparaiso. NIPSCO residential customers now pay some of the highest average electric bills among utilities regulated by the state.

The public record does not yet show where enough of that money went. There is no readily available accounting that allows residents to see how much reliability spending reached Gary, which poles were replaced, which substations were modernized, how often vegetation was cleared from vulnerable lines, where automated switching equipment was installed, or how the age of Gary’s electrical infrastructure compares with surrounding communities. The same problem exists with outage history. NIPSCO maintains detailed information about interruptions across its system, but the public record reviewed so far does not provide the kind of neighborhood-level comparison that would show whether Gary has experienced more frequent outages or longer restoration times over a period of years.

Those records would give the current disaster a longer history. A city can become more vulnerable through hundreds of ordinary decisions made over decades. Pole replacements happen on different schedules. Substations receive upgrades at different times. Circuits receive new equipment according to engineering plans and capital budgets. Vegetation management follows its own schedules. Maintenance work moves through a large territory according to priorities set by the utility and approved through a regulatory structure. When those choices accumulate, some neighborhoods can enter the next severe storm with stronger infrastructure than others.

Gary’s population gives that distribution an unavoidable racial dimension. More than three-quarters of the city is Black. A system that repeatedly leaves Gary with older equipment, more frequent interruptions, longer outages, or less preventive investment would produce a racial disparity regardless of whether anyone involved used racial language or consciously intended that result. Systemic inequality is visible through outcomes accumulated over time. Its evidence lives in infrastructure records, maintenance histories, investment decisions, outage durations, and the geography of who repeatedly receives reliable service.

NIPSCO already possesses much of what would settle the question. Its outage-management systems record when failures occur and when service returns. Work orders record repairs. Inspection records document equipment condition. Capital accounts identify projects and expenditures. Vegetation-management records show where trees were trimmed and when. Crew-dispatch records from August can establish when workers entered particular areas, what they found, what equipment they needed, and how restoration proceeded. Those records can be compared with storm damage, customer density, circuit design, tree cover, infrastructure age, and other engineering conditions across Northwest Indiana.

If Gary’s longer outages track directly with more severe physical damage and more complicated infrastructure, the record will show it. If the city has also experienced years of poorer reliability, older equipment, fewer preventive upgrades, or slower repairs after comparable failures, that record will show something larger. The distinction does not depend on speculation once the underlying data are available.

Indiana law already gives regulators a basis to examine unequal utility service. Indiana Code § 8-1-2-105 prohibits a public utility from giving an “undue or unreasonable preference or advantage” to one person or placing another at an “undue or unreasonable prejudice or disadvantage in any respect.” The language reaches the quality and distribution of utility service without requiring a finding that a decision-maker acted from racial hatred. The Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission can examine service quality, infrastructure spending, reliability, and whether customers receive the service for which approved rates were collected.

The federal response creates a separate record. President Trump approved Indiana’s emergency declaration on August 15, and Lake County, including Gary, was covered. Federal emergency assistance therefore reached the jurisdiction rather than bypassing it. Broader recovery decisions remain ahead, including the availability of additional disaster programs and assistance that reaches households more directly.

Trump’s national disaster record gives those future decisions context. An Associated Press analysis published this summer found that his administration had approved about 80 percent of disaster requests submitted by Republican governors and about 60 percent from Democratic governors. When states were grouped according to their 2024 presidential vote, more than three-quarters of requests from Trump-voting states had been approved while fewer than half from states that voted against him had been approved. The White House denied that politics influenced disaster decisions. Indiana voted decisively for Trump in 2024. Gary did not. Gary’s inclusion in the August emergency declaration belongs in the record alongside any later decisions involving Lake County and federal recovery assistance.

Gary residents have already paid the cost that accounting spreadsheets cannot capture. Families have thrown away groceries purchased from already strained household budgets. People have endured days of heat inside homes without air conditioning. Residents have searched for places to charge phones and keep medication cold. Some have watched neighboring communities receive restoration dates while their own city temporarily disappeared from the list. All of it happened after years of rate increases and utility investments sold to customers as improvements to reliability and resilience.

The records now have to account for what those residents experienced. They can establish the condition of Gary’s electrical system before August 11, where NIPSCO spent its modernization money, how often the city lost power before the derecho, how quickly comparable communities normally recovered, and where crews and equipment went after the storm. They can establish whether Gary entered an extraordinary natural disaster with an ordinary level of protection or whether years of decisions had already left a predominantly Black city carrying more electrical risk than its neighbors.

The wind explains why the power failed on August 11. The history of the system will explain why so many people in Gary remained in the dark for so long.