Power Outages Persist in Northwest Indiana After Violent Storm

Workers from True Cut Tree Care in Farmington, Michigan, have removed a tree that fell during a storm on August 20, 2026, in Gary, Indiana. Severe weather caused extensive damage, leaving over 20,000 residents without electricity in northwest Indiana nearly two weeks later.

Wind gusts reached speeds of up to 100 mph during the storms on August 11, affecting areas such as Gary, Portage, Lake Station, and Munster. As of Sunday morning, many homes still lacked power, according to NIPSCO, the local power provider. Gary Mayor Eddie Melton reported that around 17,000 residents in his city remained powerless on Saturday.

NIPSCO anticipates restoring electricity in Gary by Tuesday, August 25. However, frustration among residents is mounting as they seek shelter aid and access food from distribution centers. The city’s schools remain closed due to the crisis.

Indiana Governor Mike Braun has deployed the National Guard to support restoration efforts. President Trump approved an emergency declaration, enabling Federal Emergency Management Agency’s involvement in recovery operations.

Governor Braun urged NIPSCO to expedite their response, demanding they enhance crew numbers and utilize all available resources to resolve the prolonged outage.

“Bring in more crews. Put every available resource into the field. Get creative. Get the job done. Hoosiers have waited long enough,” Braun stated on social media.

The outage occurred concurrently with an announcement by NiSource Inc., NIPSCO’s parent company, about distributing around $140 million in dividends to shareholders. Melody Birmingham, executive vice president of NiSource and president of its utilities division, mentioned that the storm damage exemplified an exceptionally complex scenario for their recovery teams.

Birmingham explained that the repairs go beyond typical fixes, involving systems that generally take weeks or even months to reconstruct, but NIPSCO aims to complete in a shorter span. The company’s slow response has drawn criticism from civil rights advocates, highlighting systemic inequities.

Gary, with a population that’s nearly 80% Black, faces scrutiny from activists like Bernice King, daughter of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. King pointed to the outage as part of a broader pattern impacting Black communities adversely.

“Black communities have too often been expected to endure conditions that would be treated as intolerable somewhere else,” King shared on social media. “We are expected to survive the neglect, absorb the loss, help ourselves, and wait for urgency to arrive.”

The ACLU’s Indiana branch emphasized the need for equitable relief distribution across affected communities in disaster scenarios.

“It’s important that, when a disaster happens, the relief reaches every community quickly and equitably,” the group stated on Saturday.