It was Day 11 without power in Gary, Ind., and Pierre Ervin was beyond fed up.
He could not eat breakfast in his dark, storm-damaged home because he had thrown out all the food rotting in his refrigerator. So he headed to work hungry on Saturday, threading his way past the snapped trees and downed power lines littering the industrial city as frustration grew with the agonizingly slow process of restoring power.
“It’s been terrible,” Mr. Ervin, 46, said.
About 30,000 customers across northern Indiana were still without electricity on Saturday evening, nearly two weeks after thunderstorms flooded neighborhoods and pummeled the region with hurricane-force winds.
About 56 percent of those people are in Gary, a majority-Black city of 67,000 that has long grappled with poverty, population loss and disinvestment as its steel industry shrank and homes and buildings were abandoned.
“My people are being overlooked,” said Myles Tolliver, a Gary councilman whose family has been staying outside Chicago while they wait for power to be restored. “Our families are sitting in the dark. We don’t need any more excuses. We need the lights on.”
On Saturday, as power returned to some customers across northern Indiana, Gary residents said they were angry and despondent to find themselves, once again, at the back of the line. The local utility, the Northern Indiana Public Service Co., said that Gary and the nearby city of Portage would be the last to have their electricity back, potentially by the end of Tuesday.
As they sat inside their dark living rooms or on porches to escape the stagnant air inside, some residents said they doubted a rich, white town would have been left to languish for so long without power.
“I don’t understand it,” said Daymond Willis, 45, a chef at a casino restaurant, who has been without power since Aug. 11. “It shouldn’t be this long. I think If we weren’t a Black city things would be different.”
On Saturday, some residents said a few businesses and apartments had gotten their power back, and more utility trucks were rolling through the streets. Steve Segura, a city spokesman, said the utility was sending an additional 85 line workers and 240 vegetation management crews.
But residents and politicians were increasingly exasperated.
Gov. Mike Braun of Indiana urged the utility to “match the urgency” of the people who had languished without power for nearly two weeks. Mr. Braun said on Friday that he requested an expedited major disaster declaration from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to bring in more resources.
“Bring in more crews,” Mr. Braun, a Republican, told the utility in a pointed social media post on Saturday. “Put every available resource into the field. Get creative. Get the job done.”
Northern Indiana Public Service Co. said its electric system had suffered “unprecedented and widespread damage” from the storm, and did not answer its 24-hour hotline for media inquiries on Saturday. An automated message said the voice mailbox was full.
On Aug. 11, Gary was pummeled by a derecho, a group of intense thunderstorms that last several hours, which brought heavy rain and damaging wind gusts of 99 miles per hour as part of a punishing parade of storms through Indiana since the start of spring. Through July, 89 tornadoes have touched down in the state this year, well above the annual average of 28, according to the National Weather Service.
“This has been a hyperactive season for us,” said Ricky Castro, a meteorologist with the Weather Service office in Romeoville, Ill., southwest of Chicago.
But there was some relief in the forecast, with a very small chance of thunderstorms in Gary on Saturday and drier weather expected in coming days.
Donations and supplies of food, tarps, bottled water and repair kits have flowed into Gary, and President Trump granted an emergency declaration last week. There has been no visible presence of federal-emergency-management officials on the ground, and FEMA did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Meantime, residents have come together to try to help one another through the blackout.
Some have held sidewalk barbecues to feed their neighbors. Others with generators have opened their homes to let neighbors do laundry or charge their phones.
On Saturday, more than 200 people at the CityLife community center received a lunch of fried chicken, coleslaw, potato salad and biscuits that were donated by the singer Deniece Williams, a Gary native. About a mile away, a few hundred people lined outside a strip mall up for meals donated by two Chicago-based restaurants.
Ahmed Musleh, a manager of the Save More grocery store, said the market had given away 20 cases of water and grilled hot dogs for residents in need in its parking lot, about 500 feet away from where another community group had set up to feed residents.
Mr. Musleh said his store would be able to make an insurance claim for the food it was forced to discard, but he worried that his customers on food stamps would not receive the same help.
“They were already struggling, and for them to lose an entire month of food is a big thing,” he said.
Residents said the storm had already cost their families thousands of dollars in spoiled food, lost wages, hotel bills, fuel for generators and other costs of enduring the blackout.
Keya Reed, a 51-year-old warehouse worker, and her husband, Derrick Reed, a 57-year-old maintenance worker, said they had already spent $7,000 on a generator, gasoline and a tree-cutting service to haul away a tree that had downed power lines and damaged their modest home. Even as their costs pile up, they have refused to go to food pantries or take donated foods because, they said, others in Gary need it more.
Ms. Reed, who has lived in Gary her whole life, said she and others were used to dealing with the hardship.
“Everything is always against Gary,” she said on Saturday inside her home, its air dark and stuffy, the hallways tangled with electrical lines snaking to the generator. “It’s really sad to say, but I’m used to it.”
The post ‘It’s Been Terrible’: Thousands in Indiana Remain Without Power appeared first on New York Times.
