What the Gary, Indiana Disaster Reveals About Utility Accountability and Resilience
The scale and duration of the harm experienced by Gary residents were shaped by inequities, disinvestment, utility decisions, and regulatory choices that existed long before the winds arrived.
Living and working in Southeast Michigan, I am no stranger to prolonged power outages. During the Fourth of July weekend alone, nearly 400,000 DTE customers lost power after days of extreme heat and storms with winds of up to 60 mph. Those holiday-weekend outages were part of a larger pattern: Michigan residents, advocates, and regulators have raised concerns for years about recurring outages, high energy costs, and poor reliability.
So it immediately felt familiar when I learned of the power outages in Gary, Indiana, where 38,300 customers lost power after an August storm. Gary residents were among more than 300,000 Northern Indiana Public Service Company (NIPSCO) customers affected by outages across Northwest Indiana, and it became one of the longest outage events ever in modern U.S. history. Households remained without electricity for more than two weeks, and some were still waiting for restoration three weeks after the storm.
Living without electricity for days or weeks threatens people’s health, safety, livelihoods, and access to basic necessities. Beyond the human rights and safety issues, what stayed with me about Gary was how clearly the outage exposed failures that predated the storm. This was especially striking in a predominantly Black, working-class city shaped by decades of disinvestment.
Some reporting has rightly focused on disparities in recovery and NIPSCO’s actions, but much of the broader media coverage has treated what happened as unprecedented or largely the natural result of the storm. The reality is the storm was the hazard, not the whole explanation for the disaster. The scale and duration of the harm experienced by Gary residents were shaped by inequities, disinvestment, utility decisions, and regulatory choices that existed long before the winds arrived.
That distinction matters because it changes what we understand the problem to be. If we say Gary is a disaster caused by extreme weather, the conversation centers on crisis response and recovery. If we instead focus on the storm exposing failures already built into the system, the questions become bigger: what made this level of harm predictable, who is accountable, and what has to change before the next storm?
Looking Beneath the Outage
To understand what the outage reveals about utility accountability, it helps to start with NIPSCO itself. Before the storm, Gary residents were already paying some of the highest electric bills in Indiana while facing longstanding concerns about reliability and maintenance. Meanwhile, NIPSCO’s parent company, NiSource, reported more than $556 million in net income available to common shareholders during the first half of 2026. Taken together, these facts raise a basic question about what customers are paying for and the quality of service they are receiving in return. Carolyn McCrady, co-founder of the community group Gary Advocates for Responsible Development, has raised concerns that customers could ultimately see higher rates as NIPSCO seeks to recover storm cleanup costs.
“Gary, Indiana has endured too much, historically, and in the present moment,” McCrady said. “We are demanding justice for ratepayers and their families from NIPSCO and the State of Indiana.”
During the weeks the power was out, residents and local institutions managed recovery and relief efforts. Gary’s Tree of Life Missionary Baptist Church became a relief site during the outage, distributing food and supplies. The burden of an unreliable grid was not borne by the utility alone; it fell on households, churches, and community organizations that had to fill the gaps when service failed.
As the outage stretched on, residents and officials began asking whether NIPSCO’s reliability, maintenance, and storm preparedness had contributed to the severity of the crisis. Because the burden of recovery fell on communities living through the outage, impacted customers have since filed a lawsuit seeking accountability from NIPSCO over its maintenance and vegetation management, while state officials have also called for an investigation into NIPSCO's storm response, maintenance practices, and infrastructure spending.
The power outage in Gary is not a unique disaster caused by a bad storm or one irresponsible utility. Reporting from Capital B has connected what happened in Gary to similar outages in other predominantly Black communities, where poverty, aging infrastructure, utility operations, and other existing inequities can lengthen outages and make their consequences harder for residents to absorb.
Investor-owned utilities like NIPSCO exist across the country. While not all investor-owned utilities behave like NIPSCO, many of them operate as regulated monopolies. Most households cannot simply switch providers when service becomes too expensive or unreliable. Because customers generally lack that kind of market choice, state utility commissions oversee what utilities can charge and which major investments they can recover through customer rates. When commissions approve certain infrastructure investments, utilities are generally allowed to earn a profit on that spending over time. Much of the infrastructure spending is necessary, but this model can create stronger incentives for capital projects rather than measures such as preventive maintenance, energy efficiency, distributed energy resources, or customer protections, even when those measures could improve reliability, lower costs, or reduce vulnerability.
That tension matters in Gary. When households pay high bills yet still experience poor reliability and prolonged outages, the question isn’t simply whether there is enough money for utilities to make improvements. This requires us to examine what the existing system rewards utilities for doing to understand not just where the money is going, but why it’s being spent that way, and what needs to happen for customers to receive more affordable and reliable service in return for paying into the system.
Changing the Conditions That Produce Vulnerability
If the problem is bigger than one storm or one utility, the solutions have to go beyond emergency response. Faster restoration, stronger reliability standards, vegetation management, emergency planning, and grid hardening all matter. But long-term resilience also depends on what happens before the power goes out: whether households can afford their bills, whether utilities are accountable for the outcomes of their spending, and whether communities have resources that can reduce harm when grid service fails.
That means examining the utility business model itself. The same regulatory structures that shape what customers pay also influence what utilities are rewarded for investing in, including whether spending improves reliability and reduces vulnerability to outages. Just Solutions’ Affording Our Energy Future: Pathways for Action is a resource for better understanding utility reform and stronger regulatory oversight through an affordability lens. Many of the reforms mentioned in the resource are also relevant to reliability and resilience. Approaches such as performance-based regulation, for example, can tie utility incentives to outcomes such as affordability, energy efficiency, reliability, and local resilience rather than simply rewarding capital investments.
Reducing the harm caused by outages also requires investing directly in households and communities. Energy efficiency and weatherization can lower bills while making homes safer and more resilient. Distributed energy resources such as community solar and battery storage can contribute to resilience and, in some cases, provide backup power during outages. How these resources are made available can also shape whether low-income households and historically underinvested communities can benefit.
Those resources should never become a way to transfer responsibility for reliability from utilities onto households. No one should have to buy their way out of an unreliable electric grid. But paired with stronger utility accountability, they can help build an energy system in which households are better protected before a crisis begins.
Affordability belongs at the center of resilience too. A household already struggling to pay its monthly utility bill has fewer resources to replace spoiled food, miss work, relocate temporarily, or absorb the other costs caused by a prolonged outage. That is why bill protections, direct relief, efficiency investments, and utility reform should be understood as parts of the same strategy rather than separate responses to separate problems.
The goal is not only to respond better after the next outage. It is to change the conditions that make some households and communities more vulnerable before the storm ever arrives.
What Gary Should Change About the Conversation
What happened in Gary stayed with me because it felt familiar, but also because it showed how easily a structural failure can be mistaken for a one-off disaster. The immediate response matters: people need power restored, food replaced, medical needs met, and support during the crisis. Residents, churches, and community organizations across Gary did essential work. But if the story ends there, we miss the larger problem.
When outages like Gary’s are understood mainly as the result of exceptional weather disasters, the public conversation narrows to response and recovery. Those questions matter, but they do not explain why some communities enter a storm more vulnerable than others, why households pay high bills and still receive unreliable service, or what incentives shape utility decisions before disaster strikes.
Weather may trigger an emergency, but decisions made long before the storm determine how much harm follows. With El Niño expected to greatly impact communities across the country this fall and winter, communities could face more disruptions in the months ahead. That makes it even more urgent to address the conditions that leave communities facing longer outages, higher electricity costs, and fewer resources to recover when the next major event hits.
At Just Solutions, we are connecting affordability, reliability, utility accountability, and resilience rather than treating them as separate problems. It means protecting households now while changing how utilities are regulated, how investments are prioritized, and how communities participate in the decisions that shape their energy systems.
As extreme weather becomes more frequent, communities cannot be left to deal with the consequences. We need to build resilient systems that serve people and leave fewer communities this vulnerable in the first place.
Readers can learn more about Gary Advocates for Responsible Development and explore Just Solutions’ Energy Affordability Policy Library for policy approaches that address affordability, accountability, and resilience.
