Workers from True Cut Tree Care of Farmington, Michigan take away a tree from the entrance of a house after it was toppled during a latest storm on Aug. 20, 2026 in Gary, Indiana.

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More than 20,000 folks are still with out energy in northwest Indiana after extreme storms rolled through the space almost two weeks in the past.

A bout of extreme climate, including wind gusts up to 100 mph, closely affected the area on Aug. 11.

Homes in Gary, Portage, Lake Station and Munster still lacked electrical energy as of Sunday morning, according to NIPSCO, the native energy firm. In Gary, Mayor Eddie Melton said at least 17,000 residents remained with out energy Saturday. NIPSCO officers have estimated electrical energy will be restored to Gary by the finish of day on Tuesday, Aug. 25.

Frustration among residents is excessive, as many search support at shelters and obtain meals from distribution facilities. The metropolis’s faculties stay closed.

Indiana Gov. Mike Braun has activated the National Guard to help with restoration efforts, while President Trump has accredited an emergency declaration for the state. This permits the Federal Emergency Management Agency to help with restoration efforts from the storm.

Gov. Braun on Saturday also demanded NIPSCO hurry to restore energy. “Bring in more crews. Put every available resource into the field. Get creative. Get the job done. Hoosiers have waited long enough,” Braun wrote on social media.

The begin of the extended outage coincided with an announcement by the native energy firm’s mum or dad, NiSource Inc., that it would be paying out around $140 million in dividends to its shareholders.

Melody Birmingham, govt vice chairman of NIPSCO’s mum or dad firm NiSource and president of NiSource’s utilities division, said during a press convention last week that the storm’s injury represented one of “the most extensive and complex” conditions their restoration crews had ever encountered.

“When I say complex, these aren’t simple repairs. These are systems that are being rebuilt,” Birmingham said. “These are lines that ordinarily take us—and systems that ordinarily take weeks or months, that we are trying to accomplish in days and or weeks.”

The firm’s sluggish response has also been criticized by civil rights leaders and advocacy teams who have raised questions about systemic inequity. Gary’s inhabitants is almost 80% Black.

Civil rights chief Bernice King, daughter of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., said last week that the energy outage in Gary is “part of a pattern” and that residents there “deserve more than survival.”

“Black communities have too often been expected to endure conditions that would be treated as intolerable somewhere else,” King wrote on social media. “We are expected to survive the neglect, absorb the loss, help ourselves, and wait for urgency to arrive.”

The ACLU advocacy group’s department in Indiana burdened that inequality, and urgency, too. “It’s important that, when a disaster happens, the relief reaches every community quickly and equitably.” the group said on social media Saturday.