Severe thunderstorms continued to wreak havoc on residents’ power Thursday, even after NIPSCO had gotten most of the affected areas back online.
NIPSCO spokeswoman Karen McCoy said Thursday evening that as of 10:30 a.m. Thursday, 90 percent of the 24,000 people without power from Wednesday night’s storms had been restored. A 5 p.m. update on the utility’s website, however, indicated 4,623 residences were still without power.
Strong winds caused most of the damage in Gary, Portage and surrounding areas, McCoy said.
“There were 200 individual system repairs that needed to be fixed, so we redeployed much of our unaffected internal resources to help,” she said. “The majority of the individual outages had been fixed.”
McCoy said the company understands how frustrating power outages are and that workers were working around the clock to fix them. They were also monitoring the next round of storms headed toward Northwest Indiana Thursday night.
McCoy further said that any downed power lines should be treated as if they’re live, and residents shouldn’t touch them.
Power to the Town of Highland, which at one point Thursday afternoon had almost 1,000 customers without power, was supposed to be fully restored by 5 p.m. Thursday, McCoy said.
Highland Public Works Director John Bach said workers had been out all day making sure basins were cleaned of debris.
“We’ve had a few calls about flooding in the back yard, but so far, we’re doing OK,” he said.
Michelle L. Quinn is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.