Gary, Indiana, sits on the southern shore of Lake Michigan not too far from where I am on the South Side of Chicago. I know that city well and my Project H.O.O.D. has done many events and good works there.
The one thing everybody knows about Gary is that it is the birthplace of Michael Jackson, a place where one of the biggest stars the world has ever known was forged. In the years before Jackson was born, Blacks moved to Gary from the South to work in the steel mills and many made good livings. But today, Gary sits in the middle of the Rust Belt, and it faces high poverty, widespread vacancy and a long population decline. Its population fell from more than 80,000 in 2010 to an estimated 67,289 in 2025.
Gary is one of those places where the streak of bad luck never seems to run out. I say this with a heavy heart because I know that many people there are good people and they’re trying their best to make some kind of fortune out of their city’s misfortunes. What no one could have predicted is what hit them next — literally.
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The weather people on TV call it a derecho. Unlike a tornado that spins in a circle, a derecho consists of winds running straight through with great force. On Aug. 11, a derecho swept through Northwest Indiana, bringing widespread straight-line winds of 70 to more than 100 mph. A 99 mph wind gust was recorded at Gary/Chicago International Airport. Those gusts were comparable to the winds associated with a Category 2 hurricane.
While many of the nearby towns and suburbs felt the derecho, Gary was among the communities hardest hit. I heard from my contacts there that trees that stood for generations had been uprooted and fallen into power lines. The poles holding these lines snapped. The storm brought down trees and power lines across Gary, causing widespread outages. More than 20,000 Gary customers were affected at one point. Within a few hours, it appeared as if nearly everybody in Gary lost power. The city that once powered America’s steel industry was now sitting in darkness.
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For nearly two weeks, thousands of Gary residents remained without power. The suffering on the ground was terrible. There was no air conditioning to combat the sweltering heat. Senior citizens who needed breathing machines had to do without. Parents had to take what food they had in their warm fridges and save what they could by cooking the meats at the nearby parks. Some families who were fortunate enough to have generators were soon reporting them stolen. People couldn’t charge their phones and businesses couldn’t stay open. Life in Gary came to a literal standstill.
NIPSCO now says it has restored power to 99% of affected customers, though some residents still need repairs to privately owned equipment before they can safely reconnect.
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In the nearby towns, the lights began to flicker back on and the people in Gary thought they would soon be next. But the days went by and there was still no power.
My Project H.O.O.D. team drove into Gary along with many other nonprofits and churches, and we lent a helping hand wherever needed. After the derecho hit, we got calls and texts from our friends in Gary and we knew we had to help in any way possible.
We brought people produce, hot meals and the basic necessities such as soap, shampoo, toothpaste and the like. Just because the infrastructure failed the people of Gary, it doesn’t mean that we humans can’t come together and help one another.
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While in the streets, I started to hear the word that the reason for the lack of power was racism. Gary is a Black city and some folks there felt they were deliberately being left behind. People said, “Why isn’t our power on? Why do all the White folks have their power and we don’t?” As time passed, these mutterings grew angrier and expletive-laden. I understand their frustrations and I understand the human need to reach for explanations, but feelings are not facts.
Gary was in the direct line of fire and the utility company’s damage assessments show that the city suffered an unbelievable amount of damage. The utility said the derecho caused historic damage across Northwest Indiana, including roughly 300 damaged distribution poles and 44 damaged transmission poles. The scale of that damage complicated restoration in Gary and other hard-hit communities.
What I have read shows that the process to restore power must follow a standard order: major lines are targeted first so the greatest number of customers can be restored safely and efficiently. This is not bigotry. This is engineering. Blaming race here does not turn the lights back on. It only gives everyone an easy excuse to avoid the harder work.
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And the harder work has been avoided for too long. The outage has prompted serious questions about whether tree-trimming and grid preparedness were adequate. A proposed lawsuit makes those allegations, while NIPSCO disputes them and says it has increased vegetation-management spending.
All around, the infrastructure weakens with every passing year and no one wants to invest. The leaders seem to be in the mode of managing decline instead of demanding excellence. And so, when the derecho exposes these failures on a catastrophic level, the temptation is to shout “systemic racism” and wait for someone else to fix it. This mindset has kept too many of our communities in the dark long before any derecho arrived.
What the aftermath of the derecho revealed was a resilient, compassionate and strong community. Residents have been caring for their neighbors and sharing what little they have. The churches and volunteers came together to hand out meals. Outsiders drove into Gary in trucks and even semitrucks full of food.
My team will be back, and we plan to open our second Project H.O.O.D. location in Gary. We will provide workforce development programs, mentorship for the youth, violence prevention, reentry rehabilitation for the formerly incarcerated and more.
Why all this energy now? There wasn’t much of this energy before the derecho hit, and that is why we have to ask, “Why now? Are we going to let this energy go to waste?”
I hope not because this is the kind of energy that builds cities. That builds neighborhoods.
What the derecho revealed is that we have the strength, manpower and will to make our lives better.
All this talk about systemic racism will only keep us down. Perhaps that is the lesson here and the one that the people of Gary need to hold onto if they want to climb out of this hole.
