Eight days after severe storms swept through northwest Indiana, about 75,000 customers of Northern Indiana Public Service Co (NIPSCO) were still without power late Wednesday afternoon.
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More than 20,000 were in Gary, a city in northwest Indiana's Lake County, where full restoration is not expected until Aug 25, reported news agency Associated Press.
Lake County, along the Illinois border, accounted for most of the remaining outages. As repair crews worked around the clock, residents returned to community centres in Gary for hot meals and to charge their phones.
The outages date to severe weather that began on Aug 11 and initially knocked out service to about 300,000 NIPSCO customers. The utility has called it the largest and most widespread outage event in its history, the Associated Press reported.
City grid needs extensive rebuilding
In Gary alone, roughly 300 poles and 44 transmission poles require repair or replacement, said Melody Birmingham, executive vice-president and group president, utilities, at NiSource, NIPSCO's parent company.
Winds reached 159kmph at Gary/Chicago International Airport during the Aug 11 storm. The National Weather Service preliminarily confirmed the system as a derecho — a widespread, long-lived line of thunderstorms that causes significant wind damage.
