Power Outages for Weeks: Workers Pay the Price, NIPSCO to Blame

Nearly half of the roughly 70,000 residents of the majority-Black city of Gary, IN were left without power for about two weeks after the Northern Indiana Public Service Company (NIPSCO) failed to prepare for a major storm on August 11.

Severe storms, flooding, and tornadoes swept the Midwest, killing seven people and cutting power for hundreds of thousands, including over 370,000 NIPSCO customers and a majority of Gary residents.

While power was gradually restored across the surrounding area, NIPSCO repeatedly pushed back its estimated restoration date for Gary, which is 75% Black and has a poverty rate above 29%.

Nearly two weeks after the storm, about 30,000 residents in Gary remained without power. NIPSCO said it restored power to 99% of Gary residents by August 25, still leaving hundreds without electricity.

According to Gary’s mayor, the city was not initially included in NIPSCO’s restoration schedule.

Residents told The Atlantic they threw away maggot-infested food from refrigerators and moved in with neighbors who had generators during the summer heat. Medication spoiled, while many residents went without adequate medical care. Nearly one-fifth of Gary’s population is 65 or older.

Relief efforts reached city residents unevenly, monopoly media outlets report. Photos show residents waiting in bread lines wrapped around the block to receive what little assistance that came.

NIPSCO customers pay the highest bills out of all the state’s private electricity monopolies, according to Citizens Action Coalition, a consumer advocacy organization. Last year, the monopoly was approved for another rate hike, supposedly to improve its power lines and technology. Since the latest storm, NIPSCO has filed for three electric rate increases with the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission for a total increase of $7.33 a month.

A class-action lawsuit has been filed against NiSource, NIPSCO’s parent company, by Gary residents who allege that the monopoly failed to properly maintain trees around power lines, contributing to the prolonged outage.

NiSource is one of the largest utility monopolies in the country. The monopoly was previously sued after its subsidy Columbia Gas of Massachusetts was responsible for the simultaneous explosion of 80 homes and business in Massachusetts in 2018. The explosions and subsequent fires injured at least 25 people, killed 1, and forced thousands to evacuate. The monopoly paid hundreds of millions of dollars in fines after pleading guilty to violating federal safety standards for mishandling gas pressure sensors.

Monopoly profit-driven mismanagement is exacerbated by the Trump administration’s cuts to federal weather monitoring and disaster services, including $400 million cuts to weather forecasting and public alert services, among other programs in 2025. The Trump administration has proposed billions of dollars more in cuts to federal weather studying and monitoring services to fund more subsidies and tax breaks for billionaires and funding for the military budget.

Gary was a US Steel company town, named after the founding chairman of US Steel and once home to the largest steel mill in North America, US Steel’s Gary Works. Over the years, through automation, restructuring capital to more profitable ventures, and moving production to areas with lower labor costs like the US South and overseas, the steel monopoly has carried out mass layoffs while intensifying the exploitation of the remaining workforce. While the Gary Works remains the largest single employer in the city, the number of people it employs has gone from over 30,000 in the early 1970s to 2,246 in 2023. Poverty and unemployment have increased in the city coinciding with this shift, and the crumbling infrastructure is left unsupported by a dwindling tax base.

Image: Gary, Indiana, in 2019. Credit: Paul Sableman.

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