Tens of thousands of residents in northwest Indiana remained without electricity for a ninth consecutive day on Thursday, forcing them to throw away spoiled food, queue for hot meals and search for places to charge their phones.
In Gary, schools remained closed after the deadly storm on 11 August brought down trees and power lines. Residents used social media to locate laundrettes and places with working Wi-Fi, while others looked for food, nappies and cleaning wipes for low-income neighbours, reports AP.
Meanwhile, heavy rain in central Ohio triggered flash flooding in Columbus, the state capital, on Thursday morning. Floodwater covered roads as emergency crews rescued motorists trapped in vehicles and saved a 12-year-old boy who was swept off a bridge.
Northern Indiana Public Service Co said 68,000 customers remained without power as of Thursday morning, with most of them in Lake County, near the Illinois border. The utility said it had restored electricity to 306,500 customers since 11 August. However, some areas, including Gary, may not have their power fully restored until Tuesday.
Courtney Page-Tan, a professor at Indiana University Indianapolis who studies community resilience, said health risks increase with each additional day of a prolonged power outage.
Many residents are using generators, and poor ventilation can cause carbon monoxide poisoning. People who depend on medical devices also face the risk of losing power to those devices, while refrigerated food that was previously safe to eat can become hazardous as it spoils.
“Nine days is a long time for a community to be without power,” Page-Tan said.
Residents exhausted after days without electricity
Shatiya Hardin, who has worked as a hair stylist in Gary for 25 years, has been unable to reopen her salon since the storm. She said residents in her low-income neighbourhood initially accepted the outages with patience, but that patience is now wearing thin.
“We’re always in survival mode in Gary. And I think that’s probably why it wasn’t so much of an uproar because the first few days, it was like, ‘OK, we’re used to this …. but this is the second week now,” Hardin said. “It’s not OK for us to continually be in survival mode, doing the best that we can.”
More than a week after the storm, many residents in East Chicago, Indiana, who had lost electricity regained power, only to lose it again.
Kevin Mejia, who runs a community Facebook page, was among those affected on Thursday.
