Northwest Indiana continues work to restore power for communities damaged by August 11th’s storms.
In Porter County, the majority of the residents in the city of Portage were left without power for more than a week. Portage Mayor Austin Bonta talked to Barb Anguiano and says there’s still a lot of work left ahead to help residents get back on their feet in one of the state’s hardest hit areas.
This interview has been edited for time and clarity.
Austin Bonta: I mean, I think we're now exactly two weeks away from when the storm hit, the derecho, on August 11. It was an extremely powerful storm, you know, that came through. They call it like an inland hurricane, and felt like one, minus the water. It literally went from a day where we anticipated there being a storm and maybe a pretty rough storm, to all of a sudden the sky turned green and then black, and then we all knew that something very bad was happening. When it was, I don't want to say done, but when the worst part of it had happened, I got a call from my police chief, and he essentially said the whole city is destroyed.
I didn't know what that meant until I got into my car. You just saw that the power was out everywhere. We found out later by the numbers we had 15,000 homes, which is basically everybody, without power.
Barb Anguiano: A big part of the conversation right now has been NIPSCO’s response, and NIPSCO’s ability to come in and take care of the things that need to be taken care of.
Bonta: Yeah, so I think that there's something to be said for the vegetation and the fact that when you've got a company that has the right of way, the easements, the ability to clear trees to make sure that they don't disrupt power lines, I think there's something to be said very much for the importance of doing good vegetation management. But I think that what's also starting to really gain traction, and I hope gets more attention, is the level of staffing. NIPSCO’s got great linemen, great workers all around who do the service. I think a big question that people in Northwest Indiana should be asking is, ‘Is NIPSCO maintaining enough of them?’
I mean, in a storm like this, you're always going to probably need some outside help, like the people that came from all over the country, you know, to work on that. But I think that there's something to be said for what is our native workforce here in Northwest Indiana. There's something to be said for the age of so much of NIPSCO's infrastructure. We're all dealing, in Northwest Indiana, with the fact that in the last two years, electricity prices have just gone up and up and up. I think the question we're all asking is, are we getting our money's worth? Because, look, it's one thing if prices go up. I don't think that anybody likes it when that happens, but when prices keep going up, and it seems like there's a power outage every storm?
Even the fact that right now, it's taken two weeks, you know, for places to be getting power back, including large areas with, you know, pretty big populations like Portage and Gary. For the amount of time it's taking, I think that the question really needs to be asked: What is the status of NipSCO's infrastructure, and what are they doing to upgrade it, maintain it, and make sure it can handle future storms?
Anguiano: How do you [communicate] with residents in an emergency where nobody's got electricity, where nobody's got Wi-Fi, where it may be hard to get word out that there is a food drive down the street or whatever, or anything like that?
Bonta: I think that some of that's going to vary, you know, city by city, knowing your community. So in our case, we had access to the school system's all call system, which was handy. We used it pretty sparingly, just because we wanted to save that for like really big announcements, like you know, take cover, or making sure that people knew where shelters were available.
Day to day in our city, social media was definitely something that was utilized by residents, especially even when the internet was down and people were just using their phones. I think a lot of people were going to social media to try to figure out what was going on, in my case, I was putting out hourly updates, and I thought that that was very important. And the reason why I thought it was very important is because by the time that I got out of the school building and made it back to city hall and talked to the fire chief and the police chief in person, both said with the scale of damage that we anticipated that this could be a three-week outage, and by that we didn't mean like what actually turned out to happen, which is hopefully a two-week outage where people were gradually getting power, or a three-week outage where people are gradually getting power.
I mean the idea that we were two weeks ago thinking that by this time almost everybody could still be without power, and what that might mean in the event that that is a prolonged huge outage, so we treated it as that level of an emergency from the start, both from how we responded quickly to get the roads open as fast as possible, but also in terms of how fast we moved to get word out to what was going on. Here's where the shelters are. Here's where food is.
I think also people knowing how much progress we were making, you know, us being able to put into percentages how passable the roads were based on how many of the intersections, you know, were that we got open. I think we announced when we were at 50% and then we started making announcements as we made it up to 95% and then of course we stated once everything was open. Now, of course, since we got everything open now and then a tree falls, or you know, a wire comes down, and then we're not actually at 100% anymore.
But I think that it was a major thing for people to follow, maybe not in real time, but certainly on an hourly basis. Just some update, you know, of what was going on.
Anguiano: When it comes to mass chaos events, severe weather, emergencies… misinformation does tend to spread. Is there anything that you heard or saw that was concerning to you?
Bonta: I'll start here. There was stuff spread online saying that NIPSCO wasn't serving the city of Gary at all after a shooting or alleged shooting that took place in Gary during the process. I'll never speak to issues of something under investigation, especially in another city. But NIPSCO made it absolutely clear that they were still working in the city of Gary, and yet there were people consistently spreading misinformation that NIPSCO wasn't doing work in Gary at all because of that. That actually impacted us too because that’s another thing.
For a while, NIPSCO, when they do their estimates on when places are going to be at 95% or higher, you know, power back, they do it based on service districts that are named after one of the cities or towns in their service district. So, the city of Gary, Portage, and then I believe South Haven, Ogden Dunes, and Burns Harbor, we're all in one service district, which has about 107,000 people in it called Gary. So we dealt with that in the past, where there were estimates given where Portage wasn't in there.
In both times, I tried to explain to people that's because we're part of the Gary district. Wherever you see Gary, that's part of Portage's ETA. I know that I've been in meetings with NIPSCO where I said, "Is it possible – not to give us our own service area – but could NIPSCO calculate – I think this would benefit Gary too – can you show us where like the west side is going to be by a certain time, the east side, and maybe Portage, or include us in the east side, or you know?” What NIPSCO ended up doing though was they maintained the Portage and Gary timeline together, basically stating that we're going to give an estimate based on when Portage and Gary are both at 95% back. But they just listed Gary and Portage next to each other, which did help alleviate the issue of you know Portage not being on there, but it still gave the impression that Portage was gonna basically not be restored until Tuesday for people who were out.
I bring up the thing about the misinformation about the shooting and NIPSCO and the misinformation about NIPSCO’s response. There were people who hadn't seen a truck on their road or their street, and they had first seen the misinformation about the shooting in Gary leading to NIPSCO pulling out, which was not the case. But then residents were calling, asking me, and putting on social media, ‘Does this mean Portage isn't getting serviced either?’ And what I was saying is, ‘Well, no, Portage is being serviced as well because NIPSCO hasn't stopped working on it.’ Eddie did an incredible job, you know, doing what he did in response to that. I think that the other part that ties in is just the misinformation, or maybe just misunderstandings of people not understanding how an electrical grid, you know, works. So I know that there were people who tried to spread the rumor that my house got power back immediately. I had to explain NIPSCO doesn't power houses individually. You know, there's lines you know that then go to the substations.
Then there's a whole thing that runs all the way to your individual neighborhood and then your house. So that was something that was very tough on the misinformation side. And one of the things that I want to do once this is wrapped up, once we have a sense of normalcy again, once everybody's got power, I'd love to see a public presentation for the community that just gives an overview of how the electricity actually works in the city, and why it is that sometimes you have to wait, but also why it is that sometimes you don't see a truck.
Anguiano: Is there any specific part of the city that still needs extra attention?
Bonta: So right now, the very far northwest side of the city, we're still checking in to see if people need water delivered. We're still checking in. I'm going to be knocking on doors again. I've been trying to go to the areas where the power has been out for a long time, knock on doors and just check in with residents, but you know, all said and done, we're still just trying to make sure that we're not missing anybody. We don't want this to seem over and then find out that there was a house that got missed or something, you know.
Anguiano: All right. Well, thank you so much for sitting down with me.
Bonta: Thank you so much. Appreciate it.
