I Grew Up in Gary. I’ve Never Seen a Power Outage Like This.

I’ve experienced dozens of power outages growing up in Gary. But usually an outage had boundaries. A neighborhood, a section of a city, or maybe part of a county. You could drive a few miles and eventually find light again. But last Tuesday, as my wife and I drove through Merrillville, Hobart, and Portage in search of a coffee shop to work from, the darkness seemed to follow us.

Indiana’s second-largest county was dark. Almost all of Northwest Indiana was.

So when NIPSCO announced that this was the largest outage in the company’s history, I wasn’t surprised. I had spent the afternoon driving through it.

Here’s the thing about a power outage this widespread, stretching across communities and lasting this long: The darkness is more disruptive than you expect.

Traffic lights stop working, and suddenly every intersection becomes an exercise in trust. Cars back up for blocks. You inch forward and hope the person coming from the other direction is paying attention, is patient, is decent. For a few seconds, your safety rests solely in the hands of a stranger.

Then you realize there is nowhere to go. No Walmart. No library. No Starbucks. No restaurants. Then, the food in the refrigerator begins to warm. 

Then there is the damage itself. The heartbreaking, visceral evidence of what had happened. Lumbering trees collapsed onto homes, tangled in power lines, or stretched across roads as if they had simply lain down from exhaustion. Places you had driven past a thousand times suddenly looked unfamiliar.

And then one day without electricity stretches into two. Two becomes three.

The little reservoir of warm water left in your water tank drains. Now you’re bathing in cold water. You can’t wash your clothes. You can’t cook. Your phone becomes something you ration, watching the battery percentage fall like a countdown.

Then night comes.

The August heat has been sitting inside the house all day, trapped in the walls, the furniture, the bedrooms. There is no air conditioning for relief. You lie in bed sweating beneath a ceiling fan that does not move, staring into a darkness that feels different when you know the houses around you are dark, too.

You close your eyes hoping to open them to the blinking time on the oven. 

Nope.

I spent more time than I care to admit sitting in my SUV, the air conditioning running, burning petrol and time.

It felt like an apocalyptic movie.

As of Aug. 21, about 20,000 customers remained without electricity in Gary — nearly half of the roughly 43,000 NIPSCO customers still without power across Northwest Indiana. Javonte reports that his power was restored this week.

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