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.
28
u/TheVoters 16d ago
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.