Thousands of northwestern Indiana residents were still without electricity on Aug. 23, nearly two weeks after a violent storm ripped across the region on Aug. 11 and left homes, trees and power lines damaged. Gary Mayor Eddie Melton said roughly 9,000 customers in Gary were still in the dark and called the wait for repairs far too long.
Melton said families had already spent 12 days without power. He said that was too long for children, too long for parents and too long for businesses trying to keep going. Indiana Gov. Mike Braun echoed that frustration, saying there was no excuse for the delays as the Indiana National Guard and other state teams moved in to help clear the way for NIPSCO crews.
The storm swept across northern Illinois and northwestern Indiana with winds that reached 70 mph to more than 100 mph, knocking down many trees and damaging homes and power lines. Northern Indiana Public Service Company said 16,476 customer accounts remained without electricity as of 4 p.m. CT on Aug. 23, down from 374,500 outages at the height of the storm. The utility said it expected power to be broadly restored to Munster by midnight on Aug. 24 and to Gary and Portage by midnight on Aug. 25.
That broader timetable, though, did not match what some households were being told. Northern Indiana Public Service Company said those estimates were not the exact restoration time for any individual home or business, which helps explain why some addresses could take far longer than the neighborhood average. Resident Denise Bairns said she had been told electricity might not return to her home until Sept. 12. “That is too long to be without power,” she said.
Officials and residents are stuck with the same basic problem: the system-wide numbers are moving, but too slowly for people still waiting to switch on a light, charge a phone or keep food cold. The National Weather Service has preliminarily identified the storm as a derecho, but its final analysis will not be complete until sometime in 2027. For Bairns and thousands of others, the immediate question is simpler than that. It is whether the power crews can get to the homes still waiting before September arrives.
