Tens of thousands of people in Indiana are entering a second week without power after a deadly storm brought down trees and power lines. Schools remain closed, businesses have not reopened, and free meals are being distributed in Gary. This is the same storm system behind the flooding that prompted the state’s request for further federal relief.

Why restoration takes this long

A week without power in a wealthy country strikes many people as inexplicable. The explanation is in the shape of the network rather than in anyone’s competence.

Electricity reaches homes through a branching structure: high-voltage transmission lines, then substations, then distribution lines along streets, then the service drop to each building. Repairs proceed in that order, because fixing a street before the substation feeding it is pointless.

The first stages restore large numbers of customers quickly. The last stage — individual poles, spans and service connections, each requiring a crew to travel to it — restores a handful at a time. The final few per cent of customers routinely take as long as the first ninety, and they are dispersed, which is why the people still without power are scattered rather than concentrated.

Tree damage makes it worse. A line brought down by a fallen tree cannot be repaired until the tree is cleared, which requires different crews and equipment, and often a road to be reopened first.

What a week without power actually does

The harms compound in a sequence that is well documented after every major outage, and that rarely makes the coverage.

• Food. Refrigerated and frozen food is lost within a day or two. Replacing a week’s groceries is a significant cost for a household that has also lost a week’s wages.
• Medical. Refrigerated medicines spoil. Home oxygen concentrators, CPAP machines and powered mobility equipment stop working. This is the harm most likely to be fatal and least likely to be counted in a storm death toll.
• Water. Households on well water lose their supply entirely, because the pump is electric.
• Income. Closed businesses mean unpaid hourly workers, and closed schools mean parents who cannot work even if their own workplace is open.

Free meal distribution of the kind happening in Gary is a response to the first of those. It is also an indicator: charitable food provision at this stage means household reserves are gone.

The argument about burying lines

Every prolonged outage produces the same question: why are the lines not underground?

Utility engineers give a consistent answer with real trade-offs on both sides. Buried distribution lines are largely immune to wind and falling trees, and that is a genuine advantage in storm-prone areas. They also cost several times more to install, are considerably harder and slower to repair when they do fail — locating a fault underground is difficult — and are vulnerable to flooding, which is itself increasing.

The cost is recovered through customer bills, which is why the decision is made by regulators rather than engineers, and why it tends to be made selectively: burying the highest-value or most storm-exposed sections rather than the whole network. Consumer advocates and utilities disagree about where that line should fall, and the disagreement is about who pays rather than about the physics.

The connected question

Indiana is dealing with two consequences of one storm — flooding and a week-long outage — and both are being handled through processes designed for discrete events. We set out how the federal relief system decides who gets help, and why most flooded households carry no flood insurance, in Wednesday’s report.

Whether prolonged outages of this kind are becoming more common is a question that needs statistics rather than impressions — outage duration data exists and is reported annually, and it is the place to look rather than at any single storm.

Sources

• NPR — tens of thousands in Indiana enter a second week without power, 21 August 2026