How can Houston avoid being the next Gary, Indiana?

Gary, Indiana, is a warning Houston should not ignore.

After a powerful Aug. 11 derecho slammed Northwest Indiana with winds approaching 99 mph, tens of thousands of Gary residents lost electricity. Some remained in the dark for nearly three weeks. That’s not merely an inconvenience, but rather a public-health, economic, and psychological crisis.

Families lost refrigerated food. Children missed school. Businesses closed. Residents searched for places to charge phones, obtain food, and escape oppressive heat. People dependent on refrigerated medicine or electrically powered medical equipment faced potentially dangerous consequences.

By Aug. 31, 99% of Northwest Indiana had regained power, but nearly 150 homes and businesses—including the home of 84-year-old Gary resident Belford Wilkerson—were still waiting.

“After three weeks, enough is enough,” said Wilkerson.

Houston needs to make sure “enough is enough” never becomes the defining phrase of a power outage in Houston.

Gary’s warning is painfully personal

Melissa Dixon and her family of seven went 13 days without electricity. Her refrigerator repeatedly lost power. Her generator struggled. Her family sought food and charging stations at community centers.

“Very stressful for a mother who can’t feed her kids,” shared Dixon.

Her question should haunt Houston officials: “Why is this okay?”

Another Gary resident, hair stylist Shatiya Hardin, described the city as living in “survival mode,” saying residents initially accepted the outage because they were accustomed to coping with hardship—but “this is the second week now.”

That’s precisely the danger for Houston’s Black communities: Turning repeated infrastructure failures into something we simply learn to endure.

Houston already knows what prolonged outages do

Houston doesn’t have to imagine this nightmare. A Rice University Kinder Institute analysis of the region’s 2024 storms found that nine in 10 Houston-area residents experienced a power outage. More than seven in 10 lost power for more than two days. Nearly eight in 10 threw away food, more than two-thirds reported health impacts, and more than half of workers reported lost income.

Now stretch two days into one week, two weeks, then three.

After one week, refrigerators and freezers become financial losses, air-conditioning becomes a luxury, and families begin rearranging work, school, and childcare.

After two weeks, businesses face mounting losses, medically vulnerable residents face greater danger, and neighborhoods without functioning cooling centers become increasingly difficult places to live.

After three weeks, Houston could be confronting food insecurity, disrupted water and sanitation systems, medication failures, school closures, business failures, and enormous mental-health stress.

And Houston’s heat makes prolonged outages near-death traps.

Houston is doing more—but is it enough?

CenterPoint Energy says it has substantially hardened its system since Hurricane Beryl. As of Aug. 31, its Greater Houston Resiliency Initiative had installed more than 82,000 storm-resilient poles and pieces of equipment, cleared 13,727 miles of vegetation, installed 818 automated grid devices, and undergrounded 884 miles of power lines. The company says its goal is to reduce outage impacts by 900 million minutes by 2029.

CenterPoint also has an Emergency Operations Center, outage tracker, Power Alert notifications, and procedures for pre-positioning crews.

Those are meaningful improvements. But Houston residents have every right to ask whether those investments are enough to guarantee that a catastrophe won’t become a three-week catastrophe.

A 2024 Kinder survey found 94% of Houston residents already expressed concern about the electric grid. Former Harris County Judge Ed Emmett warned that while Houston is more prepared for an Ike-like event, “the people” may not be.

Rice energy expert Ken Medlock has similarly warned that Texas’ growing electricity demand requires additional reliability “insurance.”

The city needs power when the grid doesn’t

Houston has begun building another layer of protection: resilience hubs. The city’s network is designed to provide food, water, cooling or heating, medical and mental health resources, communications, and other assistance during extended outages.

Kashmere Gardens offers a particularly important example. After years of advocacy, the neighborhood’s multi-service center finally received a permanent generator in 2025. Then-councilmember Letitia Plummer helped secure the nearly $900,000 investment.

Plummer said residents had endured “unbearable heat, freezing and cold, and lack of resources,” calling those conditions unacceptable.

Community advocate Huey German-Wilson has argued that Houston historically “always just reacted in the moment” and lacked a disaster plan. Her solution is neighborhood-based resilience hubs that build relationships and resources before disaster strikes.

Texas is finally planning for catastrophic outages

Texas lawmakers have also begun addressing resilience more directly. A 2025 law requires the development of recommended resilience standards for municipal energy systems and microgrids, including protections ensuring electricity and fuel remain available for recovery after a catastrophic outage. The state is also required to develop an all-hazards plan addressing catastrophic power loss.

But planning on paper isn’t the same as protection on the ground. Houston needs measurable deadlines, public reporting, and accountability.

What Houston should do now

Houston can learn from Gary. When power companies and elected officials left Gary’s predominantly Black residents hanging, the people turned to each other. Those who had power sources shared them with neighbors. Stores with deep community roots provided free food and water. And Gary reported no uptick in crime or looting. The people of Gary provided a blueprint for being their brother’s and sister’s keepers.

Here are other steps Houstonians can take to avoid or get through a major power outage:

For the City of Houston:

• Equip every major multi-service center with reliable backup generation.
• Establish strategically located resilience hubs in vulnerable neighborhoods.
• Require regular public tests of generators, communications, and emergency plans.
• Maintain emergency supplies of water, food, ice, medical equipment, and fuel.
• Prioritize neighborhoods with seniors, medically vulnerable residents, and high energy burdens.
• Create clear outage benchmarks that trigger escalating emergency responses.
• Coordinate continuously with CenterPoint, ERCOT, Harris County, and surrounding cities.
• Make outage information available through multiple communication channels.

For neighborhoods:

• Build phone trees and block-level emergency contact lists.
• Identify residents who depend on electricity for medical equipment or refrigerated medication.
• Establish churches, schools, and community centers as potential neighborhood refuge sites.
• Organize shared generators, solar batteries, cooling equipment, and emergency supplies.
• Check on seniors, children, disabled residents, and people living alone.
• Develop plans for food distribution, transportation, and charging phones.

For families:

• Keep several days of water and nonperishable food.
• Maintain flashlights, batteries, battery banks, and backup communication methods.
• Know where the nearest cooling/warming center or resilience hub is located.
• Keep medications and important documents protected.
• Have a plan for medically vulnerable family members.
• Never operate a generator indoors, in a garage, or near windows.
• Report outages and monitor official restoration information.
• If conditions become unsafe, leave before the situation becomes an emergency.