Portage Mayor Austin Bonta used the Northwestern Indiana Regional Planning Commission’s Executive Board meeting Thursday as a virtual campfire to share stories about how the historic Aug. 11 derecho affected communities across the region and how they and the state have responded.
“We’ve all been going 100 mph in response to the storm,” he said, and a lot of people are experiencing fatigue as a result.
“We’re still in shock a little bit,” Chesterton Councilman Jim Ton said. The massive storm with hurricane-force winds has shown the strength of Northwest Indiana, its ability to come together in a crisis, he said.
“In the unincorporated areas, we don’t have a lot of resources,” Union Township Trustee George Topoll said.
“A lot of people who have whole-house generators helped everybody else,” he said. He thanked people who stopped to pull tree debris out of roadways.
“There’s a lot of people and a lot of credit to go around,” Topoll said.
The Union Township Volunteer Fire Department responded to “a tremendous number of calls,” more than 50 in the first couple of days after the storm. “Plus a lot of these people have jobs. God bless them all.”
Throughout Porter County, trees that have stood up to 100 years have collapsed in cemeteries, Topoll said.
He also noted the irony of people running whole-house generators after complaining about the noise a data center’s emergency backup generators would cause. Topoll has a generator on order for his home.
“I usually don’t lose power at my house. I lost it this time for six hours,” Cedar Lake Councilman Robert Carnahan said. Others in Cedar Lake have speculated that he got his power back so soon because he’s on the council, he said, but that’s not how it works.
“If you’ve never had an outage go longer than two or three days, you don’t realize how the electrical system really works,” Bonta said. People think it goes straight from power plant to individual homes, but it doesn’t work that way.
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When a park gets its power restored, it’s not because NIPSCO considers a park a higher priority than a home, he said. “That park just happens to be in an area that got power.”
Bonta likened it to the city’s response to a big snowstorm. “I always remind people we have a plan for how we get the routes open,” he said, with main roads being cleared first and then plows working their way into less busy streets. “There’s an electrical version of that, too.”
People have asked the city about when NIPSCO trucks would be on their street, but a lot of times there aren’t trucks needed on each street to bring the power back. “I think what we dealt with a lot was people not knowing” how the grid works, Bonta said.
LaPorte County Surveyor John Matwyshyn suggested revisiting a plan to generate power along the same footprint as power is consumed as a way to help immediate neighbors.
“We didn’t get hit as bad,” Beverly Shores Councilman David Phelps said, but the response is a strain in a town with just three full-time employees and a $600,000 general fund that has to cover the police department and the fire department contract.
The town has an unusual grid with “crazy hookups,” he said. One neighbor might have power while the other doesn’t.
What the town doesn’t have is an emergency response plan. “Beverly Shores will end up with a plan,” Phelps said.
LaPorte County Commissioner Joe Haney said in a normal emergency, highway workers from an unaffected area can go to one of the others to help out. This storm, however, affected the whole county.
“We’ve got multiple power poles snapped,” he said, and accessing them is challenging when they’re not in a front yard. “You’re having to go in back yards and alleys in the whole region.”
In addition, the ground was saturated after all the rain, so it’s harder to get heavy equipment in to set poles.
Haney praised the response from state government. “The rain had hardly stopped falling when the governor’s office reached out to us,” he said.
Anthony Ferraro, Gov. Mike Braun’s appointee to NIRPC, said the Indiana Department of Homeland Security is operating at Level 3, working 12 hours a day.
The state’s immediate contribution is crews to help clear specific roadways for emergency vehicles, once the Indiana Department of Transportation has made sure downed power lines are safe to go near.
“I expect the response phase of this emergency to conclude maybe tomorrow, depending on conditions and information,” he said.
“INDOT has been doing yeoman’s work,” Ferraro said.
INDOT Northwest Deputy Commissioner Matt Deitchley urged people not to put tree debris on the state right of way because it hinders efforts to keep the highways clear.
Ferraro spoke of a webinar for local officials about the financial cleanup after the debris removal.
“This is going to be Recovery 101 and showing this is what you’re eligible for in state assistance,” and how to access it, along with how to lower the community portion of the financial burden, he said.
“Gov. Braun spoke with the president, and we got the emergency declaration,” Ferraro said. “That does not unlock FEMA dollars yet.”
“I need to have the communities get every citizen’s help” to get the full extent of damages reported to get the federal dollars, he said.
“The flooding we’re experiencing downstate is biblical,” with up to 11.24 inches in 48 hours, in addition to the effects of the derecho. State officials are tallying those damages, too, including working with county emergency management agencies to get assessments completed.
“We’re working around the clock, and we want to be completely responsive to any community,” Ferraro said.
“This is going to be a long road. We’re going to be talking about this in weeks if not months.”
Doug Ross is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.