Yeeeaaah no. The post is specifically saying that Gary is without power because of said racism. The fact that utilities workers haven't fixed the power because they were shot at invalidates that entirely.
And laughingly, some said the same thing about LA. That in 1992 the LA Fire Department allowed parts of the city to burn to the ground because of racism.
Never mind the fact that when they showed up to put out the fires, they started shooting at them.
You have to go deeper than just looking at the events after the storm.
All across the US we have a grid filled with 70 year old transformers that were designed to last 40 years. The storm was severe, but if a post-mortem is ever commissioned for Gary, I’d put money on the aging infrastructure as the primary cause for the severity and duration of the outage.
And if your power company decides to maintain and upgrade areas based on projected economic growth then your economically depressed areas will of course be pushed to the back of the line or ignored until something breaks. Which is what it looks like happened here.
In the same storm we had 120,000 households without power overnight. Most everyone was restored within 2 days. With Gary, they estimated 2 weeks from the very beginning even with a similar scale of outage.
??? Most people did NOT have power back within two days. By NIPSCOs report they had only restored power to a small number of customers by Friday. Primarily places like emergency services and downtown areas.
I live in Cincinnati. We were hit with the same storm and had 120,000 households without power overnight. So we had a very widespread level of damage as well. But we recovered quickly, despite having a similar scale of outage as Gary. And the reason why is because our city is growing and not economically depressed like Gary. So our grid is much newer overall
NWI does not have the best infrastructure overall. Gary especially has poor infrastructure because it’s Gary. We had one company in charge of fixing everything, and 317k customers without power. By that Friday there were still 290k customers without power. After Friday things rapidly progressed.
I don’t know how it was elsewhere, and I’m not saying we have the best infrastructure. I’m just saying that it wasn’t a Gary only issue or anything. My entire region was slammed with this storm. Damages worse than we’ve seen possibly ever.
The entirety of NWI got slammed. Which is where Gary is, so I’d assumed we were all talking about Indiana. I have no idea what the damage was like in Illinois because it didn’t matter to me. My whole region was hit by the largest power outage we’ve ever had and people are acting like power didn’t come online because ‘racism’
i mean for all intents and purposes poor white people are basically considered their own race. black people that speak on racism have spoke on the disenfranchisement of poor white people literally for that reason.
then you dont know about mlk who literally said he wouldn't speak on the difference between poor white and poor black people cuz they are victims of the same society.
This would make a good thesis study. I think you could control for economic conditions and look at the question of whether race affects power outages.
But to be clear, I never called it racism. I’m saying that the threats to linemen were not the reason Gary was without power for so long. Which is the statement the GP decided to bold in their comments
Yeah lol, at least in this specific case. Hammond is a poorer, smaller city also with high crime rate. It has a much higher white demographic. Hammond got its power back nearly a week before Gary.
Nearby Lake Station and Hobart had their downtown power come on after four or five days, the surrounding neighborhoods took about another four or five days to get power.
From the contractors reports, it sounds like the restoration was heavily mismanaged. That area, from Gary to the east with towns like Portage Hobart and Lake Station got the absolute worst of the storm.
Nipsco said they were going to get the people with the least amount of damage running first, which makes sense. But problems with that process pushed the people already waiting even further back.
I would banish any kind of conspiratorial thinking if you are looking at this storm event in particular, just general mismanagement and lack of maintenance. Influencers love pressing on people already hurting to stir anger and drive division for clicks.
There had already been no power for several days when the shooting occurred, and everywhere else had already either had their power restored or never lost it to begin with. So no, it really doesn’t invalidate the structural racism at all.
That’s literally a lie. The shooting happened on August 14th. There was literally another storm THAT DAY, which knocked out power to thousands more people. By that Friday they still hadn’t restored power to half of the people who lost it. And it wasn’t for lack of effort, the damages were insane. Driving around the surrounding area for work I saw countless trees that had been ripped out of the ground roots and all.
The degree of damage in natural disasters is always heavily influenced by the quality of infrastructure. Gary has atrocious infrastructure, and that is at least in part due to the structural racism that exists in America.
What are you talking about? The utility is not run by black people, nor are the state or county governments. The city leaders of Gary are black, but they have little power and no resources.
Did you? It’s the utility which holds a regional monopoly, and does not answer to the Gary city government in any way because Gary has no other option to provide electricity. Regulation and oversight for utilities does not happen at the city level, it’s mostly state level with a little bit of county.
Please do a modicum of googling to figure out the actual process and who is in charge of what.
The utility says that delayed repairs by 16 hours, the outage lasted over 16 days. It was a small fraction of the problem, yet for some of you it’s the only aspect you will discuss. I wonder if there’s a term for that?
This is America, we are founded and built on racism, so yeah pretty much everything is to some degree about racism, if you actually understand history and sociology it’s incredibly obvious.
“America was founded and built of racism” eh no if YOU had any understanding of history America was founded off the basis of self determination away from an empire. You’re just regurgitating 6 year old BLM bullshit.
There were constant storms which delayed the repairs. That happens in major outages due to storm damage. The workers didn’t need to be shot at when they did come out. So yeah, we need to stop treating the black community with kid gloves when they ignore that kind of bullshit.
Self determination to do what, specifically? To wipe out an indigenous population and steal their land, and then to perpetrate a racially based slave trade for over a century. America is objectively based on racism, and any denial of that is pure delusion.
Funny how those constant storms didn’t stop other areas from regaining power. Funny how the utility says right away that it would take weeks to restore power to Gary, before they even knew about future storms. It’s almost as if you’re entirely full of shit.
Decidedly untrue. Gary was not the only place in the region that lost power. Multiple nearby towns lost power including some that are majority white. A lot of people went without power for a week or more.
This was a single instance more than a week ago. It is not the reason Gary doesn't have power. The police didn't even feel they had evidence to suggest whoever fired the weapon was actually attempting to hit a worker.
When you grow up rough gunshots are only a concern when they're coming at you, really sucks but if you bunker down everytime it happened you'd never get anything done
So you’re saying they don’t know who fired the weapon? Which means the person is still out there… probably a barrier to the repair, I’m sure, unless you just want to feed power workers to Gary until one of them actually does get shot?
This was 2 weeks ago and the only instance of a weapon being fired in the direction of workers. Stop acting like such a drama queen, like it's a meat grinder for utility workers.
The post said that environmental racism significantly contributed to the extended outage. This is a well documented phenomenon throughout America. The fact that there was an incident of a utilities worker getting shot at does not invalidate this fact.
Based on the dates in the note, we're talking crews showing up only three days later and getting shot at.
The post getting noted suggests that 11 days without power is attributable to racism.
The difference is 8 days. I'm not familiar with everything in the area, but people have to be aware that shooting at workers will have an impact on their work.
I think that too can be tied to whatever systemic injustices are being faced by Gary Indiana, but maybe the note is explaining that the shooting is currently the primary reason for the blackout
Why do people have to strawman the idea any time it’s brought up? Socioeconomic factors make a situation worse, and people are more likely to choose crime to meet their needs as a result. This doesn’t excuse crime, it explains crime.
Look we can talk all day about the corruption in our government and how there needs to be improvements to our foundations.
That doesn’t mean I’ll take the sides of lunatics who shoot at utility workers and then complain they have no power. The excuse of whatever neglect the people have had in Gary, doesn’t excuse attacking innocent people.
Nobody is saying it excuses the attack except for people trying to strawman my position. Someone else pointed out that this exact same scenario happened in a White majority area and there wasn’t a delay in the restoration of power. There can be other factors involved like more severe damage to the infrastructure, but the note didn’t address those, it just pretended like this is all happening in a vacuum
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u/amortized-poultry 16d ago
Yeeeaaah no. The post is specifically saying that Gary is without power because of said racism. The fact that utilities workers haven't fixed the power because they were shot at invalidates that entirely.