GARY, INDIANA – Ruben Chavez was in an elevator at his high-rise apartment in Gary, Indiana, on August 11, when severe storms knocked out the power. He got stuck between the fourth and fifth floors, and according to a staff member who helped retrieve him, workers at the building called 911, operated by Lake County, but nobody answered. So security and maintenance staff rescued Chavez themselves. “The security and maintenance guy came around and they brought me a ladder,” he told me as he sat near the entrance to the Park Shore Commons, where the power was out for a total of 12 days. “I had to get on my belly and slide down. They guided my feet on the ladder.”
The building’s power was restored on August 22, but on August 26 when I visited, the complex reeked of rotten food, which had spoiled when refrigerators stopped working. World Central Kitchen, a humanitarian organization, was still stationed outside delivering food to the residents. Chavez’s problems did not stop with the elevator incident. He relies on insulin that needs to be refrigerated, an impossibility while the power was not working. And with the elevators out, going up and down the stairs was challenging for him, as it was for a handful of other residents at the building. “If I needed to take something up, I needed my backpack, my cane,” he told me. “I’m grabbing the handles of the stairwells and just taking it as easy as possible.”
The power is finally coming back on in Gary, though when I visited hundreds were still without. Stories are unearthing about the squalid—and sometimes dangerous—conditions that residents were forced to endure during outages that lasted up to two weeks. About 80 percent of Gary’s 69,000 residents are Black, and around a third live in poverty, the result of more than half a century of deindustrialization, disinvestment, racial segregation, and bank redlining.
Studies show climate change disproportionately hurts underserved communities in the United States, and poor countries on a global scale.
The crisis, and the slow pace of power restoration, has shone a light on institutional neglect of this community, made worse by human-made climate change. Studies show that the tornadoes, thunderstorms, flooding, and heavy winds that tore through Northwest Indiana starting on August 11 will grow more frequent and severe as global temperatures warm.
“Gary, for all of the hardship and suffering that the people there have experienced, is another clear data point for a phenomenon we’ve seen since at least Hurricane Katrina more than 20 years ago,” said Patrick Bigger, research director for the Climate and Community Institute, a think tank. “When extreme weather turbocharged by burning fossil fuels hits, it disproportionately impacts working-class people and people of color as a result of inequality exacerbated by structural divestment from their communities.”
THE SEVERE STORMS THAT SWEPT THROUGH INDIANA killed at least eight people, and left 363,398 homes and businesses in Northwest Indiana without power. Gary was just one of numerous cities and towns to get hit; the surrounding Lake County had a 95 percent outage rate, according to Gov. Mike Braun. Roads were closed, power lines were downed, trailers and cars were destroyed, hundreds of buildings were damaged, and a bridge in the area collapsed.
By the time I visited, debris and felled trees still littered the city, and cleanup crews were hard at work. I saw large fallen trees on collapsed roofs, and an uprooted tree in front of William A. Wirt High School, one of Gary’s numerous abandoned schools. I talked to one worker who is a member of IBEW Local 222 and traveled here from Jacksonville, Florida, to work 16-hour days as a contractor for the Northern Indiana Public Service Company (NIPSCO) restoring power to people’s houses. “There’s a lot of devastation here, and it’s sad to see messed-up roofs, cars,” he told me.
NIPSCO is a monopoly utility, under the umbrella of the company NiSource, and charges the highest rates of any electrical utility in Indiana. Blackstone, a private equity company, “has owned roughly 20 percent of NIPSCO since 2024 and has a senior managing director on NIPSCO’s board,” according to Matt Parr, communications director for the Private Equity Stakeholder Project. A 2023 report from the Private Equity Stakeholder Project finds that, even before its involvement with NIPSCO, Blackstone performed poorly in wage and hour violations, and “led in total reported OSHA violation fines” out of 11 of the largest private equity employers. (Last spring, NIPSCO locked out 1,600 workers hailing from United Steelworkers Locals 12775 and 13796 in northern Indiana for more than a month.)
“With that level of involvement in an essential utility, customers deserve to know how Blackstone’s pursuit of the high returns it generates through its infrastructure investments will affect long-term spending on workers, maintenance, and reliability,” Parr added. “This storm didn’t create those questions, but the prolonged outages have made them impossible to ignore.”
A class action lawsuit filed in Porter County by the Allen Law Group alleges that NIPSCO failed to adequately trim trees near power lines, leaving consumers vulnerable to the power outage. The lead plaintiff, Jack Tipold of Valparaiso, was in the middle of dental surgery when the power went out. On August 24, Gov. Braun called for the state’s consumer advocate to press for an investigation into NIPSCO. Carolyn McCrady, a co-founder of Gary Advocates for Responsible Development, an environmental justice organization, told me she is worried that the utility is planning to finance its cleanup with more rate increases.
Gary Mayor Eddie D. Melton and Gov. Braun have also been calling on the federal government to unlock more aid. The governor issued a statement on Tuesday that President Trump had approved his “request for a major disaster declaration” for multiple counties, meaning “millions of federal dollars will now be available,” but he did not provide an exact figure. Braun has estimated damages could be up to $5 billion, and I spoke to some residents who say the governor is not doing enough to tap into the state’s nearly $4 billion reserves. “It’s a kind of state where working-class people are not represented in policy or decision-making,” said McCrady, who spent hours showing me around the city.
Yet it’s working-class people who suffer most during unprecedented blackouts. Pastor Michael Watson was standing in the parking lot of the Tree of Life Missionary Baptist Church in Gary. He told me, “When the electricity goes out, you lose a lot of assets that you’re normally accustomed to having day-to-day. Even for those who have a basement, you got the sump pump that goes out. Now the basement gets flooded with water, smells like sewage. The refrigerator goes out. Food that you have bought is now spoiled.”
“And then when the electricity goes out … things start to compound,” he continued. “Now you’re trying to find money to have a generator. If you don’t have a generator, you’re trying to find a way to keep cool. But it’s hard to keep cool when there’s no ice around in the house. Then you have to try to get gas for your car. So now the gas stations are packed up because everybody is trying to get gas to run generators.”
For people who are already stretched thin, the financial hit is devastating, said Watson, who, unlike McCrady, was not critical of the governor, though he did express concern about the slow response to the crisis. “You’re trying to survive two weeks with no money like that. You’re going to run out, and now you’re sitting there trying to stand in line in food banks for three to four hours with your children,” he said. “You can’t send them off to school, because the schools don’t have any power, so things just start to compound and start playing a toll on your mental health, your physical health. You cannot get meds, you cannot afford medicine.”
Cassandra Mosley, also at Tree of Life, normally uses Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits to help feed herself and her young son. But because the power was out, it wasn’t possible to process electronic benefit cards, she explained. “A lot of us had just got food stamps probably a week or two prior, so when this situation happened, we lost a lot of groceries,” because refrigerators stopped working, she said. She was eventually able to get hers by filling out an affidavit “to let them know that I lost all my power.” But others, she said, haven’t been able to access this benefit, a fact I confirmed with a gas station attendant, who described turning away people with EBT cards.
To help cover food during the storm’s aftermath, she said, “I was able to come to the church, and our church was able to be a blessing to us and help us.” According to Pastor Watson, the church has fed “over 5,000 families.”
AT THE SERENITY LAKE INDEPENDENT LIVING COMPLEX for seniors in Gary, the lights went out on August 11 and did not come back on until August 23, residents told me. Bernetta Murrey has been living there for almost 11 years. “We really bonded,” she said. “We were on our own.” In the first three or four days after the storm, residents had to fend for themselves. “A majority who live here have cars,” she said, so they drove to get food.
Not everyone could do that. Another resident, Mary Gant, explained that some people at the facility “couldn’t go down the stairs.” When I asked how they ate during that time, she said, “I don’t know.”
Three or four days in, the women told me, residents started putting out appeals on Facebook, asking that people not forget the seniors living there. That brought in a flood of support. Community members started delivering food. In one case, they said, a younger woman showed up with colleagues and started cleaning the units. She said that her grandmother had once lived there, and she wanted to give back in her honor.
But for some residents, the outage brought other problems volunteers could not solve. Gant told me she has chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and relies on a machine to sleep. That was impossible without power. “I had to sleep upright on a chair,” she told me. And then, after a night of poor sleep she couldn’t even make her morning coffee.
I met Lou, who asked me to only use his first name, in front of the Park Shore Commons. He was in a wheelchair carrying a trash can, in the midst of cleaning his apartment. He can “walk a little,” he told me, and when the power went out, he said, he had to take the stairs. He did so “one step at a time,” while also maneuvering his automatic wheelchair. The balcony to his apartment is just above the front entrance, so he was also able to wave at people down below, and let them know when he needed food.
It was hot, he said, so he spent time on his balcony to cool off. “At night I’d get eaten up by mosquitos.” Temperatures that week got up into the mid-80s, with a brutal 93 percent humidity.
PATRICK BIGGER FROM THE CLIMATE AND COMMUNITY INSTITUTE made the situation plain. “The interminable blackout in Gary, during the dog days of summer, is in no sense an act of God,” he said. “It is the result of the long-running interplay between capital flight, deregulation, the deliberate starvation of public services, and our continuing reliance on fossil fuels compounded by structural racism.”
“There is simply no reason,” he continued, “that an entire city with a proud industrial heritage in the richest country in the history of the world should not have access to one of the core inputs of modern life.”
Gary was founded in 1906 by United States Steel Corporation, and was named after company co-founder Elbert H. Gary. In his book Racial Politics and Urban Planning, Robert A. Catlin details the institutional racism that marked the city from the start, particularly after Black workers started moving in during the Great Migration in the 1920s. “As early as 1908, the school superintendent had transferred almost all black students to a segregated school,” he wrote. And, he added, “In 1917, U.S. Steel decided to build housing for blacks only, setting the stage for residential segregation, which was totally complete by 1940 when this group made up 18 percent of the 112,000 residents. Until the 1930s, blacks were not admitted to the two city hospitals, and black physicians were not given staff privileges.”
In the 1960s, when the mill downsized, layoffs combined with white flight and bank redlining “to isolate Gary’s population,” which by then was majority-Black, writes Erin Devorah Rapoport for the Advocates’ Forum at the University of Chicago School of Social Work. The town of Merrillville, incorporated in 1971, absorbed white flight from the city, assisted by state legislation that provided an exemption from a buffer zone requirement, permitting the town to expand to Gary’s border.
The Rev. John Jackson, pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ, told Max Alvarez for a segment that aired on The Real News Network August 24 that “we are experiencing a Katrina moment.” That storm pulled “the covers off of the lack of maintenance in New Orleans for the levees … in the working people’s area of Black, brown and poor whites,” he said. “And so it pulled the covers off of the same thing I see happening here in Gary, Indiana and Northwest Indiana.”
In my numerous conversations with residents, I heard stories of people coming together to help each other, some of them high-profile celebrities, including Indiana Pacers basketball player Tyrese Haliburton, who gave a hefty donation to recovery efforts. The city’s new website for storm relief includes a list of food distribution sites, charging stations, and even a Medical Oxygen Refill Station. Not all the stories, though, are of banding together. I spoke to an older white man in the Miller Beach area of Gary who had a generator, which he was able to rely on when the power went out. He decided he needed to have a gun nearby, he said, in case he had to protect his property from “looters coming from Chicago.”
Yet most of the stories were just of regular people trying to get by. A grocery worker described having to throw out “everything,” after the food rotted during the outage. A gas station attendant recalled long lines that lasted for hours, and one time when people stayed overnight trying to get gas. Schools closed. Day cares closed. People with asthma couldn’t use their nebulizers. People without a lot of money are now left to pick up the pieces of lost wages, lost groceries, and damaged buildings and cars.
McCrady told me she is sick of all of the “nasty” coverage of the storm and its aftermath, painting the people of Gary in a bad light, and placing blame solely on the city, when Gary is a victim of such drastic, institutional abandonment and mistreatment.
“Gary is a very poverty-stricken and low-income area,” Pastor Watson told me. “It’s hard for people to make it two or three days without power. So two weeks to these people in my city, with the salary and budget they have, feels more like two to three months.”
The Gary crisis comes amid increasingly severe weather events in the United States, caused by human-made climate change, from extreme wildfires to intense heat. Studies show climate change disproportionately hurts underserved communities in the United States, and poor countries on a global scale—though rich regions are not remotely immune. The climate crisis may seem abstract, but in Gary, it could not be more concrete. “I think people understand that these kinds of disasters happen everywhere, and we read about it, and we feel for people,” said Dorreen Carey, the president of Gary Advocates for Responsible Development. “This is the first time we have actually experienced something of this magnitude here. It’s important to understand and recognize that this is part of the whole issue of climate change, and that we’re not as prepared as we should be for this.”
This article is a joint publication of The American Prospect and Workday Magazine, a nonprofit newsroom devoted to holding the powerful accountable through the perspective of workers. Credit to Maximillian Alvarez at The Real News Network, who connected me with sources in Gary, making this reporting possible.
