By Nathaniel "Beltway" Steele
Eleven days after storms tore through northwest Indiana, thousands of residents in Gary were still without power this weekend, and patience is running out.
The storms, which brought record rainfall and widespread flooding, killed at least seven people and displaced roughly 1,000 residents, according to CBS News. Many of those still sitting in the dark live in one of the poorer stretches of the state, where a prolonged outage means more than inconvenience — it means spoiled medicine, no air conditioning in late-summer heat, and mounting costs with no clear end date.
Indiana Gov. Mike Braun has publicly called on the local utility to "match the urgency" of residents who have now endured an outage approaching its second week, according to The New York Times. The governor's demand is notable for its bluntness — an acknowledgment that the response, so far, has not matched the scale of the crisis.
CBS News correspondent Ash-Har Quraishi, reporting from Gary, described a community in a state of "desperation," with residents uncertain when normal service will return. The outage has become a story not just about storm damage but about who gets fixed first when infrastructure fails — and how long the most vulnerable communities are asked to wait.
[The name of the utility company and a specific restoration timeline were not detailed in available reporting; those particulars should be confirmed before further coverage.]
What's clear is the arithmetic of neglect: eleven days without power is not a glitch. It's a policy failure until someone in authority proves otherwise.
— Compiled from reporting by CBS News and The New York Times.
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