GARY, Ind. — The power outages caused by storms that roared through the region nearly two weeks ago have one resident of this Rust Belt city literally gasping for air.
Joetta Walker, who is 73 and has asthma, uses a nebulizer to help her breathe. But right now it’s a useless piece of machinery, and she has had to rely on an inhaler to survive.
“I have a nebulizer where I need to take breathing treatments,” Walker said in an interview at her sweltering home. “I can’t do that without the electricity.”
Walker said the inhaler doesn’t give her the same level of relief.
“I wheeze,” Walker said and demonstrated. “You hear it now because I get too hot.”
No other place in Indiana has suffered more as a result of those Aug. 11 storms than this mostly Black city on the southern tip of Lake Michigan, best known as the hometown of Michael Jackson and the Jackson 5.
As of Monday, more than 8,600 customers were still waiting for their power to be restored, most of them in Gary, the Northern Indiana Public Service Co. (NIPSCO) reported on its website.
Mayor Eddie Melton said he spoke with President Donald Trump and told him “explicitly that we needed help, that we needed resources.”
Melton said he asked Trump to sign an executive order “and move this thing forward so folks can start getting back to work and we start restoring Gary back to normal.”
“He said that he was going to do all that he can,” Melton said.
Melton said he also met with Republican Sen. Jim Banks. He hopes power for residents will be fully restored by Tuesday.
“I believe a good chunk of that will be restored today, and hopefully 100% will be restored tomorrow,” he said.
Melton’s hopeful forecast came a day after he ripped NIPSCO for failing to completely restore electricity to his city.
“Twelve days is too long for families to be without power,” he said Sunday in an address posted on the city’s Facebook page. “I have made it clear the current pace of restoration is unacceptable.”
In an email Monday, NIPSCO, the Merrillville, Indiana-based utility provider that supplies natural gas and electricity to over 1.3 million residential and commercial customers across the northern third of the state, said it’s “focused on safely restoring power to all customers in every affected community.”
On its website, it said it expects to restore power to all of its customers in Gary by Tuesday.
Walker said that can’t happen too soon. She said she has been relying on her nieces to bring her food and charge up her cellphone twice a day. She said she has $750 worth of pork chops, spiral hams and other foods rotting in her nonfunctioning freezer and refrigerator.
“All gone, gone,” she said.
At night, Walker said, she gets around the house by candlelight.
“I feel hurt … because I feel like they can do better than this,” she said of the power company. “But I also understand how much damage was done, and I also understand the workers have to be tired.”
Another Gary resident, Dion Thomas, 40, said Monday was the first time he’d seen power crews in his neighborhood. But they seemed to be struggling to turn the electricity back on.
“Some people’s stuff was coming on, then it went back out,” he said.
In the meantime, people have been heading to parks to cook whatever food they have left over charcoal and eat it before it spoils, said Thomas, a father of three.
“It’s been crazy,” he said.
Since the power went out, there has been a spate of generator thefts in his neighborhood, said Calvin Boone, 44, a father of four.
“The kids running around, they stealing people’s generators right now,” Boone said. “I think about the older people, the health for them.”
Boone said that everybody has been feeling hot and miserable and that some have taken to sleeping in their cars with the engines on and the air conditioners blasting.
“We ain’t getting no help,” he said.
Channie Weaver got her power back overnight. But it was too late to save the food in her fridge. She said she’d gone shopping right before the storms hit and estimates she lost $300 worth of provisions.
“All the food is gone. We about to go out and get something out to eat,” said Weaver, 50.
Weaver said she lives with her 22-year-old daughter, Desaray Weaver, and her granddaughters, Raelynn, 2, and Riley, 1.
“Man, it’s been rough,” Weaver said. “Being hot in the house, no air conditioning, plus my daughter — she’s pregnant. But it’s definitely been rough.”
Weaver and other Gary residents said in interviews that they can’t help but wonder whether the reason their city’s power is getting restored last is that it’s a mostly Black city.
“I feel like we at the bottom before everybody else,” she said.
Shaquille Brewster and Selina Guevara reported from Gary and Corky Siemaszko from New York City.
