/Health

On August 11, 2026, a derecho packing wind gusts of up to 99 miles per hour tore through northwest Indiana and northern Illinois, and by the time it passed, roughly 370,000 customers of the Northern Indiana Public Service Company were without electricity — the worst outage in NIPSCO's history. No city took it harder than Gary. Six weeks later, most of the lights are back on, but the story hasn't closed: a class-action lawsuit is moving through the courts, a member of Congress has written to federal energy regulators, a repair crew was shot at while working, and on September 3 a fresh, unexplained outage near 25th and Chase put close to 1,700 Gary residents back in the dark. What happened in August, it turns out, is the simple part. What's happening now is where the story actually lives. ## The Numbers Behind NIPSCO's Worst Outage on Record Storms hit the region hard enough that the National Weather Service confirmed eight separate tornadoes across northern Illinois and northwest Indiana that same day, on top of the straight-line derecho winds. NIPSCO serves about 500,000 electric customers total, so losing 370,000 of them — somewhere around 60% of the entire base, depending on which count you use, since the utility's own figures shifted between 363,398 and 374,500 in different updates — wasn't a bad day. It was closer to a systems failure. A few figures matter more than the rest: - **More than 38,300** homes and businesses in Gary alone lost power from the August 11 storms. - **At least seven people died**, including a four-year-old boy, according to the Indiana Department of Homeland Security. - Restoration was projected to run from **August 11 to August 25** — roughly two weeks — and Gary was among the last communities to get power back. - A 99 mph gust was recorded at **Gary/Chicago International Airport**, among the strongest readings anywhere in the storm's path. - As of late August, **more than 20,000 customers** were still without power nearly two weeks in. - On **September 3**, a separate, smaller outage near 25th and Chase affected roughly **1,700 to 2,300** customers, with NIPSCO offering the city no explanation for the cause. Put that next to the 2020 Midwest derecho that hit Iowa — a storm meteorologists still treat as the benchmark for straight-line wind damage in the region, which knocked out power to over 500,000 customers across a much wider geographic footprint but was largely restored within a week for most areas outside the hardest-hit farm towns. NIPSCO's outage affected fewer total customers but took longer, in a far smaller service territory, which is the detail that should worry regulators more than the raw customer count does. A utility that takes two full weeks to restore power to a city of under 70,000 people isn't dealing with the same kind of logistical sprawl a rural cooperative faces after a derecho crosses three states. There's also a peer comparison worth making. Commonwealth Edison, serving the Chicago area just up the road, restored the vast majority of its own derecho-related outages within four to five days during comparable summer storm events over the past few years — not a perfect apples-to-apples match, since ComEd has a bigger workforce and mutual-aid network to draw from, but it's the closest regional yardstick available, and it's not flattering to NIPSCO's timeline. ## What Gary's Outage Actually Reveals ### The Pattern Nobody at NIPSCO Wants to Repeat Gary is a majority-Black city, and more than one resident who spoke to national reporters in the days after the storm reached for the same comparison: Hurricane Katrina. Kimya Williams, 50, told CNN the outage reminded her of what she went through in New Orleans in 2005. That's not a throwaway line. It's the kind of comparison that shows up again and again in coverage of infrastructure failures in predominantly Black and lower-income communities — Flint's water crisis, the slow FEMA response after Ida hit Louisiana parishes, now this. The comparison isn't really about the storm itself. It's about who gets left waiting the longest once the cameras and the initial emergency crews have moved on. That pattern showed up in smaller, more personal ways too. Joetta Walker, 73, has asthma and depends on a nebulizer; without power, it became, in her words, "a useless piece of machinery," and she had to fall back on an inhaler for days. Joslyn Kelly, who owns J's Breakfast Club, watched the storm knock out power at noon on August 11 mid-service, then didn't get it back until roughly 1 a.m. on August 20 — eight days, an estimated $19,000 in lost sales, and a line that stuck with reporters at Business Insider: "The aftermath of the storm has been more tumultuous than the storm itself." U.S. Rep. Frank Mrvan, whose district includes Gary, made almost the same point in writing, telling the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission that Gary was one of the last communities in the region to see power fully restored. ### The Accountability Gap Nobody's Closed Here's where the story stops being about weather and starts being about a utility's choices. While hundreds of thousands of NIPSCO customers were sweating through nights with no air conditioning, the company's parent, NiSource, announced it would move ahead with roughly $140 million in dividend payouts to shareholders. NIPSCO didn't cause the derecho. But that timing is the kind of detail that turns a natural disaster into a public-relations problem the company built for itself, and residents noticed immediately. On August 15, a NIPSCO utility vehicle was fired upon while two workers were scouting the area for repair work; neither was hurt, but restoration efforts were temporarily halted — a sign of how frayed patience had gotten just four days into the outage. Two days later, residents filed a class-action lawsuit through the Allen Law Group, alleging NIPSCO failed to properly maintain vegetation near power lines and didn't do enough to prevent the scale of the outage in the first place. NIPSCO's public response was blunt: it "strongly disagreed with the characterization" of its vegetation management practices. That's still an open legal question, not a settled one, and it's likely to take months, possibly longer, to resolve. My honestly is that the September 3 outage matters more than its size suggests. NIPSCO couldn't tell the city what caused an outage affecting under 2,000 customers, three weeks after a storm that should have put every piece of equipment in the area under intense scrutiny. Mayor Eddie D. Melton's office confirmed the outage at the city's request — not because NIPSCO proactively reported it. That's a communication failure layered on top of an infrastructure failure, and it's the kind of thing that quietly convinces a class-action jury, or a federal regulator, that the underlying problem was never really fixed. Statewide outage tracking from early September shows how localized the lingering damage still is: Indiana as a whole had around 210 customers without power on a fairly ordinary day, with Lake County — which includes Gary — sitting at the top of the list with 48 customers still out, and NIPSCO logging more individual outage events than any other utility in the state despite covering a fraction of Indiana's geography. Small numbers, but they're consistent with a grid that's still patched together rather than genuinely repaired. ## The Part That Isn't Resolved Yet FEMA is accepting individual disaster assistance applications tied to the August storms through October 25 — food, medical equipment, home repairs, the kind of aid Melissa Dixon has been counting on after she started stockpiling firewood outside her house in case it happens again. Whether that deadline gets extended, whether the class-action suit forces any real change in how NIPSCO manages vegetation and grid resilience, whether Congress does anything at all with Rep. Mrvan's letter to FERC — none of that is decided. A city that's already been compared to post-Katrina New Orleans by its own residents doesn't get the benefit of the doubt on the next storm. NIPSCO does have one, though, and it's not clear yet whether it's earned it back.