GARY, Ind. — Twelve days after a punishing storm tore through northwest Indiana, a large share of this Lake Michigan city of roughly 68,000 people is still hauling spoiled food to the curb, lining up for boxed lunches, and hunting for an outlet to charge a phone.
The trouble started Aug. 11, when a derecho with gusts near 100 mph swept across Lake, Porter, and nearby counties, snapping power lines and dropping mature trees onto homes and school buildings. NIPSCO, the utility serving the region, has called it the largest outage event in company history, with roughly 374,500 total outages logged across the storm and its aftershocks — a figure that reflects repeat hits to the system as much as it does unique households. State officials have tied seven weather-related deaths across Indiana to the storm and subsequent flooding, including a four-year-old boy, three men, and three women, according to Indiana's State Emergency Operations Center.
