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On the sixth night without electricity, a woman in Gary, Indiana stepped outside with her phone and started filming. Pitch black for miles.
Through the week she kept filming. Streets running dark in both directions. A refrigerator standing open. A shuttered Family Dollar in a neighborhood with few other options. No power. In the United States of America. Day six, then day eight, then day ten.
NIPSCO, the utility that powers the region, left Gary, more than three-quarters Black, off the restoration list.
The list went out after the August 11 storm, one town per line with a date beside it. Dyer. East Chicago. Griffith. Hobart. Merrillville. Hammond. Highland. Schererville. Lake Station. Munster. Those towns found their names. Gary found nothing. Twenty-two thousand of its 35,800 customers were still dark, 61 percent of the city’s meters, the largest of every outage left in the region.
Clocked at 99 miles an hour, the winds came in at the strength of a Category 2 hurricane, with two tornadoes inside the system. Poles snapped across Lake and Porter counties. Seven people died in Indiana that week. NIPSCO logged 370,000 outages, called it the largest event in company history, and pulled more than 1,200 outside contractors and mutual-aid personnel out of other states.
Mayor Eddie Melton spent the next days demanding a date for a city that had every other qualification for one. On August 19, at a press conference with the utility, Gary surfaced: restoration by 11:59 p.m. on August 25, later than every town named ahead of it. NIPSCO explained that some unlisted cities had been folded into larger service areas still under assessment, which told a woman on her eighth night nothing she could plan around.
The Feed
Filming dark streets from moving cars, opening refrigerators for the camera, residents posted addresses for charging stations, laundromats, food giveaways, working Wi-Fi. A vacant lot behind a community center took the overflow and became a pantry. At one school, a mobile pantry served about 150 people and ran out. Over two days the district handed out roughly 700 grab-and-go lunches and ran out of those.
Sixty-one years old and eleven days into the dark, Julene Anderson spent that day doing what she had done all week, hunting ice and hunting the gasoline it takes to go get ice. She waited an hour and forty-five minutes in line at a station. The pump ran dry at her turn. She drove home on fumes, praying out loud.
Parker Bryant is seventy-five. Because her husband Alan keeps his diabetes medication refrigerated and both of them sleep on CPAP machines, they bought a generator and started burning retirement income to fuel it, in a city where people were stealing generators off porches.
Black outlets ran it first and kept running it, and the clips spread from there: 20,000 shares, 7 million views, 8,000 comments across the posts, numbers big enough to squeeze a national desk until it moved.
The food critic Keith Lee watched the videos and asked how anyone could run a Midwest food tour while Gary had no power and “ain’t nobody talking about it.” He said it should be national news, and within days it was.
Which number made the blackout in Gary, Indiana news? 22,000 homes without power, or 7 million views of them?
1968
Newark erupted in July of 1967 after police beat a cab driver named John Smith. Twenty-six people died over five days. Detroit followed two weeks later, forty-three dead, seven thousand arrested. Lyndon Johnson announced a commission to explain it, then regretted the commission and starved its funding.
The testimony that should have ended the genre came from Kenneth Clark, whose research had helped decide Brown. He told the panel he had read the report on Chicago in 1919, then Harlem in 1935, then Harlem again in 1943, then Watts, and that reading them in order was like sitting through one film run over and over. He gave them the history of ignored reports. They wrote another one.
They published at the end of February 1968. Folded into the recommendations was a verdict on the newsrooms, which the commissioners said had “too long basked in a white world,” looking out of it with white eyes. Hire Black reporters, they said. Promote them. Station journalists inside Black neighborhoods permanently, so a newsroom would know a place before the place caught fire.
Newsrooms hired more Black reporters. The permanent presence the commission prescribed never became the rule, so the work stayed where it had always been. Ida B. Wells counted the lynchings herself and published the tally. Mamie Till-Mobley opened her son’s casket and let Jet run the photographs, because the country would need to look before it would believe. In EBONY and the Chicago Crusader, the reporting from Gary ran daily while the national desks were elsewhere.
Fifty-eight years after the commission, most of a city of nearly seventy thousand spent more than a week without power, and the coverage arrived behind footage the residents shot themselves.
The Poles
East Chicago and Hammond are majority people of color, and both got dates. The damage in Gary was worse, the grid older, the trees heavier, the assessment slower. Every one of those explanations describes a condition that existed before August 11.
None of them explains the blank space. A company that could not yet estimate Gary could have printed Gary’s name with the words still assessing beside it, the way any of us would tell a neighbor we do not know yet rather than say nothing at all. Ten towns were worth a line. The city with the most people in the dark was worth an omission, and NIPSCO left the people living inside that omission to work out what it meant about them.
A grid arrives in a city already sorted. More than 180 million utility poles carry the American system, and about a fifth of local distribution runs underground, most of it in ground broken after 1980. The American Society of Civil Engineers graded the country’s energy infrastructure a D+ last year, down from a C-.
Now drive through a subdivision built in the last forty years and count the poles. New developments get buried cable. On older blocks stand the poles they were given. Burying a mile costs $1.85 million to $6 million. Stringing a mile overhead costs about $700,000. Gary’s grid was strung when the mills were running and the city held 178,000 people. The poles that went up then are the poles that came down this month.
A city loses population, loses the mills, loses the tax base, and keeps the wire. Nobody has to decide that Gary waits longer. The decision was made when the wire went up, and it gets made again every year the money for burial goes somewhere newer.
The poles are still standing in Gary.
The Light
Most of us learned about Gary from a repost, or from someone asking why nobody was covering it. And yet the residents in those clips had been filing for a week by then, and not one thing they filmed was news to anybody living on those blocks.
A newsroom with a reporter in Gary before August 11 would have known where to look on the first dark morning. What this asks of a Black city is a second job: survive the outage, film it, post it, prove the posts draw an audience, and then receive the coverage that might have brought help sooner.
Because Gary was left off the list, Julene Anderson spent her eleventh day in a gas line that ran dry at her turn, then drove home on fumes praying out loud. Because Gary was left off the list, Parker Bryant and her husband burned retirement income to keep insulin cold and two CPAP machines breathing. Because Gary was left off the list, a woman on her sixth night picked up a phone, and kept filming for a week, because the camera was the only thing anybody outside the city would answer.
Ten towns got their line of type. The ink cost the same either way.
Residents got out from under one system by becoming fluent in another, and the fluency cost them a week they did not have. We have the reports. Chicago in 1919, Harlem in 1935, Harlem again in 1943, Watts, and a commission that told the newsrooms to go live in the places they covered. Fifty-eight years of not doing it put a camera in a woman’s hand on the sixth night.
How much proof does a city still owe after 22,000 homes go dark?
On the schedule NIPSCO published this week, Gary comes last, Tuesday, August 25, 11:59 at night, two weeks after the storm.
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Notes & Sources
Opening: the storm and the list
NIPSCO’s own outage page, carrying the community-by-community restoration schedule and the August 25 date for Gary and Portage.
https://www.nipsco.com/outages/power-outagesThe Chicago Crusader’s daily outage tracking, including Gary’s share of remaining customers without power.
https://chicagocrusader.com/the-latest-update-on-nipsco-efforts-to-restore-power-in-gary/Chicago Sun-Times coverage of the August 19 press conference, with NiSource’s Melody Birmingham on the 99 mph winds and Melton on Gary’s omission from the list.
https://chicago.suntimes.com/weather/2026/08/19/gary-power-outage-deadly-stormsSun-Times follow-up reporting that 22,000 of NIPSCO’s 35,800 Gary customers, 61 percent, remained without power on day ten.
https://chicago.suntimes.com/news/2026/08/20/gary-power-outage-storms-indianaMayor Eddie Melton’s interview with WFYI’s Barb Anguiano, in which he says he had to demand Gary-specific restoration times because the public information omitted the city.
https://www.wboi.org/2026-08-20/interview-gary-mayor-talks-storm-aftermath-many-on-second-week-without-powerWGN’s account of the updated regional timeline placing Gary and Portage last, with Melton’s remarks on resident frustration.
https://wgntv.com/northwest-indiana/nipsco-updates-power-restoration-timeline-for-northwest-indiana-communities/The City of Gary’s own storm recovery briefing, with damage assessments and restoration totals.
https://www.gary.gov/news-updates/mayor-melton-provides-storm-recovery-updateU.S. Census QuickFacts for Gary, source for the city’s current population and racial composition.
https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/garycityindiana
The Feed
Free Press Indiana’s reporting on Julene Anderson, the gas line, and the dry pump, carried by WISH-TV.
https://www.wishtv.com/weather/weather-stories/parts-of-gary-indiana-are-still-without-power-aug-21-2026-residents-blame-nipsco/The same reporting at WRTV, including council president Linda Barnes-Caldwell on neighbors delivering ice to keep medications cold.
https://www.wrtv.com/news/state-news/parts-of-gary-are-still-without-power-residents-blame-nipscoAssociated Press coverage of day nine, with a resilience researcher on generator carbon monoxide and medical devices losing charge.
https://www.npr.org/2026/08/21/g-s1-139527/indiana-storm-outagesCBS Chicago on residents charging phones in vehicles and the makeshift pantry behind the Family Life Community Center.
https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/gary-indiana-residents-power-out-until-next-week/The Black Information Network’s early account of residents documenting the outage themselves, and of Keith Lee’s response.
https://www.binnews.com/content/2026-08-19-going-insane-gary-residents-say-life-without-power-becoming-unbearable/Atlanta Black Star on Keith Lee’s TikTok, the school pantry that served 150 and ran out, and the 700 grab-and-go lunches.
https://atlantablackstar.com/2026/08/20/keith-lee-steps-in-as-thousands-in-gary-remain-in-dark/EBONY’s explainer on the outage, published as national coverage began to catch up.
https://www.ebony.com/heres-what-we-know-about-gary-indianas-power-outage/
1968
Columbia Journalism Review on the Kerner Commission’s finding about the press and its recommendation that newsrooms hire and promote Black journalists.
https://www.cjr.org/laurels-and-darts/america-knows-less-about-itself-black-journalists-lost-jobs-kerner-commission-diversity-equity-inclusion-dei-race-desks-eliminated-jackson-second-sight-du-bois-black-crossword-juliana-pache.phpMinnPost’s retrospective on the report’s February 29, 1968 release and its language on institutional racism.
https://www.minnpost.com/community-voices/2018/03/kerner-commission-50-years-later-what-has-and-has-not-changed/Jill Lepore, “The Riot Report,” in The Deadline: Essays (Liveright, 2023), source for Johnson’s regret and defunding of the commission, and for Kenneth Clark’s testimony about reading the same reports in sequence.
The Poles
ASCE’s 2025 Infrastructure Report Card, source for the D+ energy grade, the downgrade from C-, and the scale of the distribution network.
https://infrastructurereportcard.org/cat-item/energy-infrastructure/Utility Dive on the energy downgrade and the projected investment gap.
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/energy-infrastructure-transmission-transformers-civil-engineers/743698/The California Public Utilities Commission’s cost figures for undergrounding existing overhead distribution against building new overhead line.
https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/industries-and-topics/electrical-energy/infrastructure/electric-reliability/undergrounding-program-descriptionElectrical Contractor Magazine on the national share of distribution line running underground and the recent rise in burial programs.
https://www.ecmag.com/magazine/articles/article-detail/going-underground--power-line-burial-is-on-the-riseABC7 Chicago on the class-action suit alleging inadequate vegetation management around NIPSCO lines.
https://abc7chicago.com/post/painstaking-wait-power-continues-nourthwest-indiana-transmission-line-setback-schererville/19712518/
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