The young married couple made it through the storm last week, swerving to dodge power lines and trees falling into the road as they drove to shelter.
But 10 days later, they and thousands of their neighbors in Gary, Indiana, were still waiting for the power to come back on.
It’s “inhumane,” said 26-year-old Adriana Harris.
Now Harris and her husband, Jason Randolph, have fallen into a new routine. They wait in hour-long lines for the gas that replenishes their generators, fending off people cutting in line. They use a saw to remove chunks of a fallen tree from Harris’s grandmother’s roof. Then, at night, they sit in darkness.
Tens of thousands of people remain without power in Indiana after storms and historic flooding last week that left at least seven people dead. The extended power outages have been especially frustrating to residents, some of whom are not expected to regain electricity until Tuesday.
Families are scrambling for generators, lining up around the block for gas and bracing themselves for a long recovery.
Indiana Gov. Mike Braun (R) this week vented at the utility company working to turn the lights back on, calling the situation “unacceptable” and saying that management needs to “step up, take this seriously and restore power now.” State workers from the Department of Correction to the Indiana National Guard are “taking unprecedented action” to help get the power back on, Braun said in a social media post.
Officials at the utility, Northern Indiana Public Service Company (NIPSCO), says their employees — many of whom live in the affected communities — have been working nonstop on the problem.
“We’ve mobilized emergency support from across the country to help,” the company said in a statement Friday, “and together we will not rest until power is restored to every home and small business in our service territory.”
The damage is particularly hard to repair, officials say, in Gary, a city of about 67,000 less than an hour’s drive from Chicago. Winds reaching 99 mph whipped through town; trees were uprooted.
Robert Walker, director of the Department of Emergency Management and Homeland Security for surrounding Lake County, said the storm “leveled stuff.” More than 300,000 people lost power in the county, he said.
On Friday, more than 20,000 customers of NIPSCO lacked power in Gary, according to the utility. The company projects that power will not be restored in Gary and nearby Portage until Tuesday.
Schools in Gary were closed this week; officials said they hoped to learn more about a return date over the weekend.
Residents grew outraged when NIPSCO left Gary off of a Facebook update with estimated restoration times for power. Utility officials said they weren’t sure at first when they could bring electricity back.
Now local leaders are trying to reassure people that Gary, a majority-Black city with a high poverty rate, “has not been left behind,” as Mayor Eddie Melton (D) put it at a recent news conference.
“These aren’t simple repairs. These are systems that are being rebuilt,” said Melody Birmingham, an executive with NIPSCO’s parent company.
NIPSCO says more than 330,000 customers have had their power restored since the storm, but some 43,000 were still waiting.
The destruction began on Aug. 11, when a derecho — a powerful wind-and-thunder storm — and tornadoes tore through northeast Illinois into northwest Indiana. Heavy rain continued for days, flooding communities and sending the White River surging to levels not seen since 1913, according to the National Weather Service.
Harris and Randolph, 27, were at the gas station when the storm hit. The skies were a little cloudy but otherwise unthreatening when they pulled in, Harris said. Soon they turned white, unleashing fierce wind and rain.
They were close to the apartment of Harris’s mother and decided to drive there. For some 15 minutes of terror, rain all but blinded Randolph’s view from the windshield, he recalled.
“It was literally something out of a movie,” Harris said.
On the first night, the couple explored the darkness, driving around Gary “in shock” over the fallen trees, downed power lines and extinguished streetlights. But by the second night, Randolph said, the darkness had become irritating. When cell service returned, they learned that a tree had crashed through the roof of Harris’s grandmother’s house.
Randolph said he watched as NIPSCO trucks passed by his window, off to service other neighborhoods, comparing the feeling to a waiter walking another table’s tray of food past a hungry booth of diners.
“You’re literally helpless,” Randolph said.
There’s nothing to do but go outside, so residents have been gathering together and praying. Harris and her neighbors have fired up their grills to cook ribs, hot dogs and chicken.
“We’re definitely keeping the hope and keeping the spirit of Gary,” she said.
Butch Porter, state director for the Southern Baptist Convention’s disaster relief, worked Thursday from Noblesville, organizing groups of Southern Baptists from around the country.
Many people who evacuated when the first storms struck are just returning to their homes, Porter said, to find the power out, trees in their yards and their basements flooded. Basement walls have collapsed, he said, because of the intense pressure from water. And in some places, “if you pump water out, it just comes back in.”
“This is a devastating moment for Gary,” said 56-year-old Cynthia Hunter, “and a lot of us are still under it.”
Her husband said they haven’t been able to get a generator because the machines are sold out for miles around. Some nights they’ve slept in the car because the house was so hot. Costs are now piling up as they eat out, get bags upon bags of ice and buy gas that is even more expensive than usual.
Lines are long for the sole working laundromat in the area, they said — a 24-hour location about 13 miles from Gary.
Logan Wuethrich, owner and president of the Ladybug Laundry chain, said some people drove an hour to wash their clothes. Five of his 14 stores lost power in the storm; three were still out on Friday.
Mostly, he said, people have been helping each other.
“No one was mad they had to park down the road and walk with their laundry. No one was shoving, cutting in line,” he said. “It was cool to see — people were being respectful, which in today’s world is something.”
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