NIPSCO chose deferred maintenance over reliable power.
Renita Theus knows what that choice cost. She is forty-one years old, and on the eleventh day after the storm she walked to a dollar store in Gary, Indiana, for candles and batteries and found the shelves empty. Her car — the one she would have driven out of the heat to a relative’s house elsewhere in the state — was trapped beneath a tree that came down on August 11. Her house was hot. She could not sleep. Every day, she told the New York Times, she cried.
“I feel bad for newborn babies and people on ventilators,” Theus said. “I think if this was a richer area, it would be different.”
She is correct.
That sentence is not an anecdote beside the analysis. It is the analysis. It tells us what the press release does not: this is not only a storm story. It is a distribution story. It is a story about who gets restored first, who waits, who has a generator, who has a hotel room, who has a second car, who can leave, and who is told to sit in the heat and call it progress.
The Northern Indiana Public Service Company — NIPSCO, the region’s major investor-owned utility — reported Saturday that 33,124 customers remained without power, eleven days after the storm system struck. The storm knocked service out for 374,500 NIPSCO customers. Across Illinois and Indiana, more than 575,000 customers lost power. The National Weather Service recorded straight-line winds of 99 miles an hour in Gary. Rainfall in many Indiana counties reached six to nine inches, with a highest reported total of at least 11.23 inches. About 300 power poles were damaged across NIPSCO’s service area.
The storm was real. The wind was the wind. The rain was the rain.
None of that answers why the outage lasted eleven days.
By the end of the second week, 85,000 NIPSCO customers were still without power. The number later fell to 33,124, which is the number NIPSCO foregrounded in its statement about “substantial progress.” The number it did not foreground was the number of people still living in dark, overheated houses in Gary, eleven days into August.
Cynthia Hunter told a Chicago CBS affiliate that her family had been sleeping in a truck for the air conditioning. “We have every window in our house open,” she said, “trying to maintain safety as well.”
Bridget Sanders heard NIPSCO’s language about substantial progress and answered it plainly: “It’s ridiculous. It’s unacceptable. They need to do better. We are being left behind. We are the last ones on the totem pole.”
This is what eleven days, a hundred-degree heat index, and a vegetation-management schedule look like when they reach a human being.
NIPSCO’s defense is that its vegetation-management spending “has more than doubled since 2016.” The company denied the allegations in a proposed class-action lawsuit filed last week. Otto Shragal of the Allen Law Group, speaking for the plaintiffs, said the situation was “predictable,” “obvious,” and “preventable.”
Shragal is not alleging that NIPSCO could have stopped a 99-mile-an-hour wind. He is alleging that NIPSCO could have trimmed trees that the wind brought down, that the company had data and warnings about the danger, and that the company had a regulatory obligation to manage it.
The lawsuit will have to prove those claims. The public record already gives us the question NIPSCO would prefer not to answer: What did the company know about the trees near its lines, what did it spend to address the risk, what did its engineers recommend, and who decided that the existing level of maintenance was enough?
“More than doubled” sounds like a serious commitment until you ask what the number doubled from. It sounds like progress until you ask whether the original amount was adequate, whether the new amount matched the documented risk, and whether the company’s own engineering recommendations called for more.
A doubled inadequate budget is still inadequate.
The company published the favorable metric. It did not publish the absolute level of vegetation management, the number of identified trees within reach of power lines, the per-customer maintenance spending compared with peer utilities in storm-exposed regions, or the engineering recommendation that would show whether the company had done enough before the storm.
That is not an accidental omission. It is a choice about what the public is allowed to see.
The public framing says progress. The distributional impact says 33,124 people still without power. The public framing says the spending increased. The distributional impact says Renita Theus is walking to an empty dollar store for candles while her car sits beneath a fallen tree. The public framing says restoration is underway. The distributional impact says Cynthia Hunter is sleeping in a truck to keep her family cool.
The gap between the framing and the impact is the story.
That is cui bono in its plainest form. Someone made the choice. Someone benefits from the choice. Someone else bears the cost.
NIPSCO is owned by NiSource, a parent utility holding company. Its regulated subsidiary operates under a state-granted monopoly and under the oversight of the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission. In an investor-owned utility, vegetation management, system hardening, undergrounding vulnerable lines, and routine maintenance appear as costs. Suppress those costs and earnings improve. Earnings flow to dividends, share repurchases, and the executive compensation pool.
The benefit rises upward.
The cost falls downward.
The cost-bearer is Renita Theus. The cost-bearer is Cynthia Hunter. The cost-bearer is Bridget Sanders. The cost-bearer is the family whose four-year-old child died when a tree fell on a home in Geneva Township. The cost-bearer is the person who died in the suspected weather-related house explosion in Portage, about thirty miles southeast of Chicago. The cost-bearer is the person on a ventilator whose household cannot keep the temperature safe. The cost-bearer is the small business that loses inventory, the hourly worker who loses wages, and the family that cannot buy a hotel room, a generator, or a replacement vehicle.
Gary is a city of roughly seventy thousand people. It is majority Black, and approximately one-third of its residents live in poverty. Its poverty rate is roughly three times the state average. The residents of Gary hold a state-granted utility monopoly accountable through a regulatory process, but they do not possess the same economic leverage as the company’s shareholders, executives, or parent corporation.
Theus said, “I think if this was a richer area, it would be different.”
The mechanism by which it would be different is not mysterious.
Restoration is technical, but it is not only technical. Substations and feeder lines serving more customers per dollar of restoration cost may be restored first. That is the technical calculation. But the political calculation is also present: which neighborhoods have the leverage to demand attention, which residents can interrupt a working day to appear at a regulatory hearing, which communities can threaten a company’s reputation, and which communities can afford to leave.
A regulated monopoly whose customers cannot go elsewhere has a built-in answer to the angry customer: wait.
By the eleventh day, NIPSCO’s customers in Gary were told that they might not see power until Tuesday — two weeks after the winds hit. That is not simply an inconvenience. In August heat, it is a condition imposed on people who cannot exit the arrangement.
The situation was predictable, obvious, and preventable. If that charge is proved, then “the storm” is not an adequate explanation. The tree was the immediate instrument. The deeper cause was the choice about what to maintain, what to defer, what to disclose, and what the public would be expected to endure.
The system did not produce the outage by magic. NIPSCO made decisions. NiSource benefited from the structure those decisions served. The Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission approved rates and reviewed capital programs, but a regulatory process that permits inadequate maintenance to persist is not a substitute for adequate maintenance. The rate review is what the public sees. The rate incidence is what the public pays.
We have tracked this across the month — at the first hours of the storm, when more than 575,000 customers lost power across Illinois and Indiana, and again a week later, when 85,000 NIPSCO customers remained without power. The picture has held: an apparatus whose choices preceded the storm.
Let me name what NIPSCO did not say.
NIPSCO did not say how many trees in its service area had been identified as falling risks to power lines. NIPSCO did not say what its vegetation-management cycle was in Gary’s wooded neighborhoods. NIPSCO did not say how its per-customer maintenance spending compared with peer utilities in storm-exposed regions. NIPSCO did not say what its own engineers had recommended before August 11. NIPSCO did not name an executive whose compensation had been reduced because customers remained without power for eleven days. NIPSCO did not name a shareholder return deferred to fund accelerated restoration.
NIPSCO said the spending had doubled.
The doubling is the defense because the doubling is the most flattering metric the company can produce. It is also the metric that hides the question cui bono asks: whether the absolute level of maintenance was adequate for the system the company was operating.
Governor Mike Braun formally requested an expedited major-disaster declaration from the Federal Emergency Management Agency for fifty-four Indiana counties. The Trump administration granted an emergency declaration, the smaller instrument, with narrower reach than the major-disaster declaration Braun requested. A state relief fund is providing emergency grants of up to $5,000.
Those grants may help. They do not answer for the outage.
They do not restore the wages lost by a worker who could not work. They do not replace food spoiled in a powerless refrigerator. They do not make a trapped car available. They do not turn a hot house into a safe one. They do not convert an eleven-day failure into a minor inconvenience.
The small grant is the relief apparatus absorbing the immediate pain while the company that made the relevant maintenance choices remains protected by the separation between the rate case, the storm response, the lawsuit, and the next quarterly report. The money moves downward in fragments. Accountability remains somewhere above, where the customers cannot reach it.
This is how a public obligation disappears into procedure.
In his September 1963 eulogy for the four children killed in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing, Martin Luther King Jr. refused to stop at the names of the bombers. The perpetrators had to be held accountable, but the deeper question was the system, the way of life, and the philosophy that produced them. That is the question in Gary. Not only which tree fell, but which decisions made the tree a foreseeable threat; not only which line broke, but which budget and regulatory structure made the break last eleven days; not only who issued the press release, but who benefited from the maintenance that was not done.
King was right about the long arc of the moral universe. King was incomplete about the machinery required to bend it. The arc bends only when the apparatus holding it straight is broken at the joints that hold it. His late period was that breaking. The Memphis sanitation strike was that breaking. Malcolm X’s last year — Mecca in April 1964, the founding of the Organization of Afro-American Unity in June, the Oxford Union debate that December — was that breaking.
The breaking is what gets done now, or the arc does not bend now.
In this specific moment, the people of Gary are pushing it. Bridget Sanders is pushing it when she names the community’s place at the bottom of the totem pole. Renita Theus is pushing it when she walks to the dollar store for candles and finds empty shelves. Cynthia Hunter is pushing it when she sleeps in a truck for air. The residents who filed the lawsuit through Otto Shragal and the Allen Law Group are pushing it by refusing to let the outage become a number that disappears.
Governor Braun is pushing for federal assistance. The state is distributing grants. But relief that stops at the customer and never reaches the decision-maker is not justice. It is absorption.
The push has to reach the apparatus. It has to reach the maintenance decisions, the rate structure, the regulatory review, the executive incentives, the parent company, and the people who had the authority to know what the risk was and act before the storm made the cost visible.
The choice is plain.
One direction sends the energy into another emergency declaration, another grant, another press release, another promise of substantial progress, and another neighborhood left waiting.
The other direction sends it toward the people who chose the maintenance level, defended it with a flattering statistic, and left the cost to fall on households with the least money and the least power to leave.
The first direction is the direction of the next storm.
The second is the direction of democratic accountability.
The arc bends where the push lands. And the people of Gary have already begun pushing.
This column is part of the push.