In the wake of violent storms that tore through northwest Indiana, my family was without power for 13 days. We weren’t alone. Tens of thousands of Hoosiers in the Gary area spent nearly two weeks waiting for the lights to come back on. The Aug. 11 derecho, like other instances of severe weather, was an unpredictable event. A more-than-weeklong blackout, however, represents a systemic failure of leadership and infrastructure.
As I walk through the low-income and affordable multifamily-unit housing developments in my district, it is very obvious that the impact of this outage has not been felt equally.
We are seeing, yet again, that the burden of prolonged outages falls especially hard on our most vulnerable neighbors — lower-income families and communities of color, seniors on fixed incomes, and those living with disabilities and mental health challenges. For households with fewer resources and fewer alternatives, each additional day without power compounds the hardship.
Vulnerability exists at the community level, too. Gary entered this storm carrying the weight of decades of disinvestment, racial isolation, aging infrastructure, population loss and diminished resources. That matters in an outage, and without intentional intervention and investment, the same inequities that made our residents more vulnerable before the power outage will make it harder for our entire community to rebuild after it.
What makes this situation particularly egregious is that Nipsco customers have been paying for so-called “grid hardening” for years. We’ve seen rate hike after rate hike, often justified by the utility company’s stated need to build a more robust, weather-resistant electrical system. Gary’s residents are also footing the bill for the utility to keep coal plants online that aren’t providing much, if any, energy and small modular nuclear reactors for data centers that may or may not be developed.
Worse, on the day the storms hit, Nipsco filed yet another rate case increase with the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission. The monopoly utility filed two more rate increases days later. If state regulators approve those requests, we could be paying a nearly $88 annual increase, some of which would start showing up on our bills as soon as Nov. 1.
This isn’t what resilience, reliability or affordability look like, and this current nightmare was far from inevitable.
We have pushed for a smarter, more resilient and more affordable energy future for years. As former chair of the Environmental and Climate Justice Committee for the NAACP’s Gary branch, I led the push for the implementation of initiatives such as the federally funded Solar for All program, which emphasized the creation of resilience hubs, microgrids and distributed renewable energy. The Gary Common Council unanimously passed a resolution against a rate increase for Nipsco in an attempt to keep our residents’ bills affordable.
Nipsco didn’t listen to ratepayers or elected officials who represent its customers’ communities. Instead, it traded investing in local battery storage and decentralized solar power and properly maintaining its own aging infrastructure for higher and higher profits.
It’s time to move aggressively toward a resilient future. Let Aug. 11 mark the day we stopped watching these vital initiatives stall or be derailed by political whims and refuse to rely on a centralized infrastructure model that is clearly proving its obsolescence.
We are tired of footing the bill for a utility that fails to keep the lights on. We need transparency, we need immediate accountability and we need a shift in focus. Nipsco must prioritize people over profits, and our state and national leaders must stop obstructing the renewable infrastructure projects that offer a path toward true resilience.
We deserve a grid that works for everyone, not just those who can afford to wait.
Lori Latham represents the 1st District on the Gary Common Council.
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