For the last 11 days, after being hit with a tornado last Tuesday and severe weather for days after, tens of thousands in Gary and northwest Indiana have been without power.
Food has spoiled, schools are closed, trees are down, power lines are down, and people are suffering. They can’t take showers, they can’t make food, they’re waiting in lines for hot meals, they’re driving to Chicago just to get ice to keep their insulin and other life-saving medications cold.
According to NIPSCO, the energy company used by 100 percent of Gary residents, over 300,000 people initially lost power last week, and 33,000 are still going without. NIPSCO says that full power should be restored by Tuesday, though many residents are skeptical that this will happen at all, as they’ve said the same thing about other dates (including yesterday) that have since come and gone.
Incredibly, this dire situation has barely been reported outside of local news in Indiana and some of the Midwest until yesterday — and then possibly only because residents who were able to charge turned to social media to spread the word about what’s been going on and to ask for help and people outside the area started asking why this wasn’t national news.
Isn’t it always the way?
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It also took some time to get an emergency declaration from FEMA, though it is not clear what, if anything, they have done yet.
“At this point, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has approved an emergency declaration for Indiana, making certain federal disaster assistance resources available to the State of Indiana to supplement state and local response efforts,” Congressman Frank Mrvan said in a press conference earlier in the week. “As Northwest Indiana navigates the disaster response and recovery process following the severe storms beginning on August 11, I am committed to being a resource and trusted source of information for local governments, elected officials, and residents in our region.”
Last year, President Trump announced that he wanted to cut FEMA entirely and let states fend for themselves in emergency situations like this. That hasn’t happened yet, but Trump has been reportedly slacking on approving FEMA disaster aid in all states, and very frequently denying blue states altogether. Indiana, obviously, is a red state, but Gary itself is 85 percent Democratic and 76 percent Black.
On Thursday, Governor Mike Braun also issued a request for an emergency major disaster declaration, and may have a better chance at getting some help, as he is a Republican and that is apparently how things work now.
Via PBS:
During his second term, Trump has denied a greater percentage of disaster requests than any president dating to 1989. Those denials have not been evenly distributed among states.
Trump has approved 80% of the disaster requests from Republican governors but only about 60% from Democratic governors, according to the AP’s analysis of FEMA data.
The discrepancy is even more apparent when analyzing major disaster declarations based on presidential elections. Trump has approved more than three-fourths of the requests from states that voted for him in the 2024 election but less than half the requests from states that did not. Although there are federal criteria for disaster aid, decisions ultimately are at the president’s discretion.
From what I can tell, so far, food critic Keith Lee has been far more dedicated to organizing help and aid in Gary than the federal government has been.
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Of course, that’s just what happens when you gut the living shit out of FEMA — which for the last year or so had largely been run by a guy who believed he had teleported to Waffle House.
Technically, however, the agency was without an official leader from when Trump first took office for the second time to August 10, the day before Gary was struck by a tornado. That was the day that Cameron Hamilton was sworn in as head. To his credit, I suppose, Hamilton was fired from FEMA last year by the Trump administration for very rudely telling Congress that he did not believe the agency should be eliminated, because people probably need help when hit by disasters like this. But that’s about as good as it gets.
“President Trump is revealing his chaotic governing style by nominating a candidate who was fired last year and who lacks the experience and qualifications for the job as required under law,” Union of Concerned Scientists senior climate resilience policy analyst Shana Udvardy said when Hamilton was first nominated. “Hamilton is now back as a nominee to lead an agency that has been depleted by thousands of job cuts, unstable leadership and resource reductions, leaving FEMA less prepared to confront more frequent and intense extreme weather and climate-fueled disasters. Congress should press him for answers that the American public needs, with the safety and well-being of communities on the line.”
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Gary, if you didn’t know, was originally a company town. It was established in 1906 by US Steel (and now you get a joke from The Music Man — which was meant to take place in 1912 — that you may not have clocked), and for decades, a majority of residents worked in that industry. However, as the need for steel began to decline in the 1970s, so did the city. Today, there are 100,000 fewer people in the city than there were in the ‘70s and 30 percent live in poverty — which is part of why it’s a pretty big deal that NIPSCO is still charging people for electricity they aren’t getting. Officially, there are 6,700 buildings declared abandoned or blighted, but some have put the number at 13,000.
It would be unimaginably difficult for almost any city to deal with losing power for over a week — I whined my face off when my block lost power for a few hours a couple weeks ago — but it has to be exponentially worse (and unfortunately easier to ignore) in a place that already doesn’t have what it needs when the power is on.
We know why Trump isn't lifting a finger to help folks in Gary and it's because lots of them have a darker skin color...
Remembers back when something like this still had the capacity to be a major scandal all of 20 years ago.
Legitimately the first time I’m hearing about it and that’s obscene