Northwest Indiana leaders expressed frustration and offered lessons to learn from the Aug. 11 derecho on Thursday.
More Top Picks Best Camping Cots For Adults
They spoke at a meeting of the Northwestern Indiana Regional Planning Commission’s Executive Board.
“This was a strong community response with neighbors helping neighbors,” NIRPC spatial analyst Grace Benninger said.
Portage Mayor Austin Bonta, this year’s NIRPC chair, complimented Benninger over her “great presentation” but said, “I’ve got a million questions still.”
If a NIPSCO official were at the meeting, those questions could have been addressed. NIPSCO was invited, but NIRPC Executive Director Ty Warner said the company declined, saying it wasn’t ready yet.
Beverly Shores Town Council President David Phelps said NIPSCO’s preferred communication after the storm was through social media. The utility’s website “failed miserably on the Aug. 11 storm,” he said.
Bonta said people were calling NIPSCO asking about an outage, but the customer service representatives said they didn’t have any record of an outage in their area.
“People were saying things like they didn’t even know there was a power outage here,” he said, even though the teams responding already knew there was a massive outage.
“I don’t want to tell a company how to do customer service,” but maybe tell customer service representatives to say they can’t keep up with the number of outages in a situation like this, Bonta said.
Northwest Indiana is within a zone that should expect to see at least one derecho a year, according to the National Weather Service.
Bonta said there was also a consistent issue with how NIPSCO reported estimated restoration times.
Portage, Gary and Burns Harbor are all within the Gary district for NIPSCO, causing people to ask why Portage wasn’t on the list, Bonta said.
The Gary district covers about 107,000 people in 75 square miles, Bonta said, yet Schererville has its own district, allowing Schererville residents to get estimates on when to expect power to be restored.
“I had a good experience with NIPSCO,” Union Township Trustee George Topoll said. He regularly speaks with his NIPSCO contact about issues like downed or sagging lines. “There were a lot of good things that NIPSCO did,” he said.
More Top Picks Best Electric Mountain Bikes
“We didn’t get any responses, feedback from anybody,” Chesterton Town Council member Jim Ton said. “People were trying to call us asking what’s going on, and we didn’t have any answers.”
“When you get silence or nobody answers the phone, you’re pretty much up the creek,” he said.
“All the cities and towns and townships should have a liaison that they can reach out to for NIPSCO for various reasons,” Phelps said. “It’s very difficult to get to the right people.”
Portage has a designated NIPSCO liaison to work with the city, Bonta said. After some days, NIPSCO invited mayors and town managers to join a daily call for updates, he said.
“I think every community ought to have a contact personally for NIPSCO,” Ton said. When Chesterton restructured the town government, there was no town manager. In cases like that, the clerk-treasurer or someone else needs to be appointed as the contact person between NIPSCO and the town, he suggested.
“Don’t forget the townships,” Topoll said. Some of them, like Union Township, don’t have cities or towns.
LaPorte County Surveyor John Matwyshyn said NIPSCO keeps track of its equipment. “There certainly is an easy way to converting that converthic areas,” he said.
Matwyshyn suggested taking a look at the “perfect power” concept used for research labs in the 1970s. “Essentially their experiment is lost” if the power goes out, so backup power is vital.
Doug Ross is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.