Grocery shelves have been empty for days. Children who had just started school haven’t seen their classrooms in more than a week. Insulin has spoiled in warm refrigerators, and people who depend on oxygen cannot pump it from their tanks.
Electricity has been out for 10 days throughout much of Gary, Ind., since deadly storms ripped through, knocking down trees and power lines. On Friday, residents said they were growing increasingly desperate, even as another round of rain was on the way.
“Every day I’m crying,” Renita Theus, 41, said outside her darkened apartment, where her car remained trapped under a fallen tree. “It’s hot in the house. I toss and turn and can’t sleep. I walked to the dollar store and they’re all out of candles and batteries.”
Storms on Aug. 11 caused flooding and havoc throughout the Chicago area and neighboring northern Indiana, hitting Gary, where one-third of residents live in poverty, especially hard. More than a week later, the regional power company said its crews were working tirelessly to restore electricity but were overwhelmed by unprecedented levels of damage.
The utility, Northern Indiana Public Service Co., said on Friday that 43,400 of its customers remain without power in the region, down from more than 300,000 in the storm’s immediate aftermath. Service is expected to be restored to Gary by Tuesday, the company said, calling it a “monumental undertaking.”
On Friday, Gov. Mike Braun said that he had requested an expedited major disaster declaration from the Federal Emergency Management Agency that would allow more assistance to pour into the state. Last week, President Trump granted an emergency declaration for Indiana counties affected by the disaster, and a state relief fund is providing emergency aid grants of as much as $5,000.
“I will do everything in my power to ensure Hoosiers have the resources needed to recover,” said Mr. Braun, a Republican.
Local officials warned that cleanup would likely take months.
“It’s just widespread devastation throughout the city of Gary,” said Larry E. Tillman, the chief of the fire department.
City officials said that donations of money and supplies have poured into Gary. Lowe’s sent a truck with hundreds of buckets and cleanup kits; food trucks have set up in neighborhoods to feed hungry residents; a medical facility equipped a bus to treat people. Shelters have opened to feed and house residents.
One company drove around handing out tarps so that residents could cover damaged roofs and prevent even more rain from seeping inside.
Mike Curtis, a 63-year-old retired truck driver, was busy on Friday sawing apart fallen trees behind his garage. He lives with his wife in a brick bungalow and has been without power since the storm.
“I’ve been in Gary since I was 4 years old,” he said. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”
To many people, the weather on Aug. 11 — ferocious rain, thunder and lightning — did not seem unusual for summer in the Midwest.
“I thought it was just a typical thunderstorm,” said Raydia Martin, the assistant director of Flourish Community Hub, a nonprofit that provides social services. “It was way more devastating than I initially thought.”
Every day, her organization is now feeding hundreds of people who have no food at home and no access to meals at restaurants or even gas stations, many of which are closed.
As the days tick by, many residents said they are feeling a heavy sense of neglect.
Ms. Martin said she has heard a familiar refrain as residents wait for power to be brought back to their city, a former steel powerhouse that has seen industry close up or move away.
“I hear the sentiment a lot — it just feels like we’re last in a lot of things,” she said. “Historically, Gary has suffered from disinvestment. There’s always this sentiment that we’re just not cared for.”
The unusually powerful winds that hammered Gary descended as a derecho, a group of intense thunderstorms that last several hours, traveled from eastern Iowa across Northern Illinois and Chicago and into Indiana.
The strongest gust recorded during the storms was 99 miles per hour, in Gary, said Brett Borchardt, a senior meteorologist with the National Weather Service office in Romeoville, Ill.
“Once winds get over 80 m.p.h. and close to 100 m.p.h., it can feel like you’re in a hurricane,” Mr. Borchardt said.
The city is beginning to recover, Chief Tillman said.
“We are coming out and we’re caring for each other,” he said. “That’s what you’re seeing street by street, church by church, organization by organization.”
But even with promises that power would be back by early next week, frustrations were mounting.
Dottie Johnson, a 49-year-old rideshare driver, pulled into an Amoco service station on Friday. It was the third station she had tried that day, and she quickly learned that she was again wasting her time.
“They have no power, so there is no gas,” Ms. Johnson said.
A generator was providing electricity for the station’s store, which remained open. But an employee said the pumps had been dead for 10 days.
Ms. Johnson said the same was true at her home. She faulted the utility for letting trees grow taller than power lines.
“Look at those trees,” she said, pointing across the street that she judged as overgrown. “We can’t do anything about Mother Nature, but they didn’t do enough to prevent it.”
Other residents agreed. On Friday, several filed a class-action lawsuit against the company, accusing it of failing to proactively trim trees that have toppled onto power lines, causing outages.
Officials from the Public Service Co. have said that the storm was extraordinarily large and destructive.
“This storm caused unprecedented and widespread damage across our electric system,” the utility said in a statement. “Thousands of individual repairs must be completed before service can be fully restored,” it added.
For residents like Ms. Theus, the challenges will not end even when the power comes back. She said she will need to figure out how to get the tree off her car — and find a new source of income. She lost her cleaning job in Chicago a few days ago, because she was not able to travel.
Others, Ms. Theus said, had it worse.
“There’s a lot of people here struggling. I feel bad for newborn babies and people on ventilators,” she said. “I think if this was a richer area, it would be different.”
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