Aja Bridges was at a Gary food stamp office on Aug. 11 when the storms came.
She was going to get her kids, when a security guard told her to get back inside. The power went out at the building, then it got “completely dark.”
In the basement, she quickly got “very frantic” thinking of her children. There was no cell service and no way to reach their school. The wind sounded like it was “wrapping around.”
“It was the worst feeling in my life,” she said.
As soon as she could, she left for her car. The path out was flooded.
“I gotta get to my kids,” she recalled in an Aug. 28 interview.
Caught off guard with smaller paychecks, childcare jams, or using “bill money” for unexpected expenses — Gary moms shared the challenges of living without power for two weeks.
“If it was just me, I would have been fine,” Bridges, 27, a mother of two elementary school aged children, said reflecting back. “My emergency plan was 200 folded up singles.”
‘Two kids through the apocalypse’
When she got to the school, her son — who has nightmares about tornadoes and darkness — was “red” and “crying,” she said. She hugged him and told her kids to get in the car.
Her block smelled like gas and was “torn apart” with trees blocking the street. She parked, had a neighbor briefly watch her kids in the car, went inside to grab $200 in cash, some pull-on diapers and a couple of outfits.
“I don’t have any money,” said Bridges, a nursing student and waitress. “I was supposed to work today. It was the middle of the pay week. I am out of food stamps.”
She needed gas. After calling her mom and driving around, she found an open gas station near Deep River Water Park in Merrillville and waited in line for two hours while “watching people argue.”
She managed to get a hotel room for two days, before prices went up.
“I don’t have power, I don’t have childcare,” she said. “My kids are not in school. There’s nothing for me to do, but sit with them.”
When her daycare called her a few days later, they said they had a generator and air conditioning, offering a “slumber party” so the kids could sleep there overnight, she said.
“I was at the beauty shop,” her mother DeAndrea Bridges said, on Aug. 11. “I was literally in the chair getting my hair done. It was so dark that the street lights went on.”
“We all went to the back of the building,” the mother of four said, until it was shortly over. “I, of course, start calling my kids. Where are you?”
She recalled trying to tell Aja, her daughter, to not leave the food stamp office.
Days later, Aja was trying to help her children deal with everything.
“My son was not coping well,” by night 10, Aja said. “It was hot. He’s already starting to ask questions: Mom, why do these people have power when we don’t have power?”
He learned a new word – Generac, a brand of generator.
“Did you pay the bill?” her son asked.
They were “hilarious,” she said.
Her daughter, who has autism, was knocked off her routine and unable to use the tablet that helped keep her regulated. She just started going back to school.
“I started to see her regress a lot,” she said.
Aja said she threw out $700 worth of food. Her mother DeAndrea threw out $1,500, plus she later realized her LG refrigerator’s drip pan wasn’t removable and will have to throw out the refrigerator.
“We spent so much money day to day buying food. It’s the first of the month,” DeAndrea said, adding there was mold in her basement. “We are in debt right now. Bills are due.”
Aja said the total cost during the outage set her back financially “months.”
“I pray we never have to go through it again,” DeAndrea said. “It was devastating.”
Just before the storm hit, DeAndrea watched “The Last House” — a Netflix movie where the family gets trapped in their house for years.
“If you don’t own a generator, you better put a deposit on one,” Aja said, when asked to reflect on how parents can be better prepared. “If it was winter outside…”
“Have a plan, have a place,” she said. “We didn’t have any signal. So, you better know how to find your people.”
“As a parent, you gotta have more survival instincts,” she said. “I gotta make sure I can carry two kids through the apocalypse. I gotta make sure if I gotta run from a zombie, I can hold ‘frick’ and ‘frack.’”
‘You try to get by as best as you can’
Tiffany Harrison, 45, of Gary, a social work student, was at work at a Merrillville fast-food restaurant. Customers were in line in the drive-thru, when the sky turned “literally black” and “rain came out of nowhere.” Then, the power went out.
“The first thought that came to my mind was my kids,” she said, who are aged 18, 16 and 10. “Other mothers wanted to get out of there to get to their kids.”
The usual 15-minute drive to her youngest son’s school at Gary Lighthouse took 45 minutes. It took another 45 minutes to get her other son, 16, at a different school building.
When the storm hit, her daughter, 18, woke up to a noise she “never heard before,” saw the dog pacing and went to the basement, making Harrison very proud of her judgment. By the time Harrison and her sons got home in Gary’s Midtown section, the power was off.
“It was horrible,” she said, of the extended outage. “When you have a child on the spectrum, their life revolves around routine,” she said, like breakfast at a designated time.
With the lights out, that was bothering him. She made sure to have extra flashlights. Tablets usually helped regulate him, but she now had to go out to the McDonald’s on 5th Avenue or YWCA for a few hours at a time to charge it. They were also dealing with unreliable cell phone service.
“You try to get by as best as you can,” she said.
She kept the windows open, but was afraid someone was in her backyard when her dog was “going crazy.” She also heard rumors that a man had his generator stolen at gunpoint.
When her youngest son asked when the power would come back on, she didn’t have an answer. Sometimes he would want to go to McDonald’s and she told him to stay home, because with so many people trying to charge their stuff, he would get overstimulated there.
“He started to slip into a depression,” she said, during the outage. “I tried to keep his spirits up.”
By the third day, everything was getting warm in the fridge. Ice was hard to find. By the fifth day, they threw away everything in the fridge — at least $600 to $700 worth of food — which was making the whole house smell. She had just stocked up her freezer before the storm.
Within days, she applied to replace her SNAP funds.
“It gave me a lot of hope,” she said, “that things were going to be fine.”
Days later, however, she was told it was denied, because she didn’t spend money on Aug. 11, the day of the storm.
“I could feel myself (getting angry),” she said, and got off the phone.
“It didn’t make any sense,” Harrison said. “What are people supposed to do that have lost all their food?”
The Post-Tribune reached out to the Indiana Family and Social Services Administration about Harrison’s case and what families can do to ensure they are not denied. A representative did not respond Friday to a request for comment.
Harrison said her job has the option to front part of her check early, which she took. The power was out at her job and she already lost over a week of work.
“I had to feed my kids,” she said.
People in the community also brought her and her kids food, she said.
“We were helping each other more than we were getting help from anyone else,” she said. “It kinda lit a fire in a lot of us.”
It’s hard “when you have no food” and “our house is damaged,” she said.
“We’re still getting bills from these companies,” she said. “We have no food and we’re still getting NIPSCO bills, Indiana American Water bills.”
Experts advise to stock up, don’t involve kids in ‘adult’ worries
During an emergency, parents need to stock up in advance with clean water for several days and should have food — like Spaghetti O’s — that can be eaten cold from a can, if necessary, said Dr. Hilary Fairbrother, professor of emergency medicine at UTHealth Houston.
“It’s not ideal, it’s not going to be the most delicious food, but it’s going to keep bellies full,” she said.
Eggs can last on the counter for a couple days, and hard cheeses and bread can last before there are signs of visible mold, she said. Gas stovetops can be lit with a match, but she emphasized opening windows for proper ventilation and using carbon monoxide detectors.
Gas generators should be kept 20 feet from a home, not in an enclosed space, and away from air conditioners to prevent possible carbon monoxide poisoning. Local fire departments have also emphasized waiting until a gas generator cools down before refilling it.
Fairbrother also reinforced more things people were already doing, like seeking out food giveaways, places to use the internet and phones.
If your child has medical needs, it’s crucial to have a plan in place — and a “backup backup plan,” she said. Ideally, that means a generator or a place to charge medical devices, like ventilators. As a last resort, you can go to a hospital E.R. to charge devices, Fairbrother said.
“You do not wait until the battery is dying,” she said. “Pull the cord and go early.”
She also advised to keep an emergency supply of medicine. According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, insulin can be safely kept at room temperature for up to 28 days.
Kids can color and play board games, but as tempers get short, when all else fails, take a walk, she said.
“You are not going to be able to sit in your house and neither are the kids,” she said.
When children ask questions parents don’t have answers for, they should be truthful in an age-appropriate way — but also don’t bog them down in “adult” details and worries, said Dr. Khalid Afzal, a University of Chicago child psychiatry professor.
“Any disaster situation requires some kind of stability and safety for a child,” said Afzal, who sympathetically added he grew up with regular power outages in Pakistan.
“It’s important we tell them we don’t know. It’s ok not to know,” he said. “We are trying to fix it, we are safe.”
Parents should have “some kind of daily routine” if possible — like meals or the “same bedtime routine” that a child can plan on. They should give kids “some responsibility” — like getting the water bottles to compensate for a loss of control, he said.
He advised avoiding sharing uncertain details or worries with children — like when the power is coming back on. When kids ask questions, acknowledge their critical thinking, but don’t make up an answer.
“If we do not know, we do not need to tell them,” he said.
For many children, hugging, holding hands and reassuring them is important. For special needs, or nonverbal children, he emphasized each child is different.
One suggestion was to create a “color chart” to help them “communicate how (they) are feeling,” he said. “Parents know their language.”
It was important for parents to regulate their own emotions under pressure, he said. In kids, they should also watch for signs of hunger, thirst, or sleep disruption, or that they are not coping well emotionally with a break in their daily routines.
As a last resort, if a teen, for example, shows signs of self-harm, take them to an emergency room, he said.
Gary community helped each other
By the second week, people started coming outside, Harrison said, seeing more kids and elderly neighbors.
Her youngest son has since “settled back” into school.
There was a psychological impact and Harrison said she feels some people have signs of post-traumatic stress. When the air conditioning goes on-and-off, “I jump, because I think the (power is out).”
When asked what the city could do better next time, she pointed to better access to food lines and hygiene products, not only for working parents — available, too, after their shifts — but also for the elderly who couldn’t make it.
The community pitched in for each other, she said.
“I’ve been living in Gary since my daughter was seven,” Harrison said. “I have never seen Gary this united, ever. That has been the best thing.”