Northwest Indiana is used to bad storms, some worse than others. Aug. 11, certainly, but also the 1967 blizzard. The March 1998 ice storm that shut down the Borman Expressway for three days. Major flooding in 2008 and earlier years.
Even as the response to the Aug. 11 derecho continues, Northwest Indiana leaders are considering how to plan for the next major disaster.
The Northwestern Indiana Regional Planning Commission Executive Board looked at the issue Thursday.
“We’ve all been comparing notes about our storm recovery experiences – what worked, what didn’t,” Economic Recovery Corps fellow Celena Green said.
For Green, whose term at NIRPC expires next month, Aug. 11 wasn’t her first derecho rodeo. She experienced a similar one in June 2023 in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Oklahoma is famously known as the headquarters of Tornado Alley, but that title is in jeopardy as Tornado Alley moves eastward. Illinois had more tornadoes than Oklahoma last year.
“This may be something we experience more often going forward,” Green warned.
“For the longer-term recovery, it takes months or years,” she said. For municipal workers, “that long-term recovery effort competes with your normal job,” she said.
Resilience means preparing for the next disaster to shorten the next recovery.
Green recruited Francesa Parent, a fellow Economic Recovery Corps alumna, to speak to the executive board about building the Kisatchie-Delta Regional Operations and Resiliency Center in Alexandria, Louisiana, to strengthen collaboration and improve disaster response, to promote sustained economic recovery.
Central Louisiana, Parent said, is impacted by any storm in the Gulf of Mexico. Her first hurricane was Laura, which hit Louisiana at Category 4 strength. The region went seven weeks without power and two weeks without water.
After the immediate recovery – “not a fast process” – the region began looking at a response plan.
“You will be talking about the storm 10 years into the future,” Parent said. Odds are, there will be another devastating storm within that time. “Ten years is not abnormal; you’ll need to address a storm.”
“Disasters don’t respect municipal boundaries. They don’t respect county lines,” she said, so a regional plan makes sense.
A 2011 study said that for every $1 spent in mitigation, $7 is saved in recovery funds, Parent said.
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“One disaster not recovered makes the next disaster worse to recover from,” she said. “The more communities talk about it, the better,” not just in the immediate wake but during planning going forward.
“What systems can be built now so the next time a storm goes through, they are already in place,” she suggested.
“Hearing that 10-year timeframe was a surprise to me,” Green said.
Portage Mayor Austin Bonta, whose city was among the hardest hit by the Aug. 11 derecho, suddenly has a lot of experience in responding to a disaster.
“We had different organizations, of course, reach out,” he said. “It was kind of like drinking out of a fire hose having so many people reach out to offer support.”
It hit Portage officials that they don’t know when the next storm is that they’re going to need that level of volunteers. He’s concerned about identifying best practices soon, “especially when we have so many interesting municipal lines that a storm doesn’t pay attention to that.”
Municipalities might not be prepared for that influx of help and goodwill.
Portage quickly came up with a waiver form for volunteers to sign, relieving the city of liability for any injuries or other bad things that might happen to volunteers. A worker in the planning and building department took calls from people who needed help and directed volunteers to their homes.
Not all municipalities have the capacity to handle volunteers and interest at that level, Parent said, so agencies like the United Way and Salvation Army can help. Identifying partnerships in advance can speed the response to a disaster.
A listening session with victims, volunteers and others who helped with the response would be good, Parent said, to hear what went well and what could be improved.
Porter County Council President Andy Vasquez said collaboration is important.
“That’s one of the sore things of this area is that the region, we all identify it, but we really don’t all work together.” The emergency management agencies from each county in the region should work together, he said.
“While we are a region, each section of the region is different,” Vasquez said. “Communication is very apparent, and the lack thereof.”
Vasquez, a farmer, pays attention to weather patterns. “I’ve been saying Tornado Alley will be us in a few years, and guess what? Here we are.”
For right now, “we’ll worry about the cost afterward because we need help right away,” he said. The county’s cost for helping unincorporated areas is expected to be $7.5 million to $11 million. Counties should help municipalities and vice versa.
“It’s going to happen again, folks. You’d better believe it,” Vasquez said. It takes a while for FEMA to arrive, and action has to begin right away.
Parent understands that well. Six months after Hurricane Laura, an ice storm hit Louisiana.
“It is a massive effort to pick up trees on the ground,” she said. But leaving a downed tree on the ground can create a fire risk. In 2024, after a drought, 680 wildfires popped up in Louisiana, she said.
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Chesterton Town Council member Jim Ton suggested municipalities look to organizations like Rotary International, which has a disaster relief program. The Chesterton/Porter Rotary Club is buying a supply of prepackaged and dehydrated foods to store at fire stations in case of any future disaster like this.
“If we can pay for fireworks to put in the sky on the Fourth of July, we can put a meal on the table of hungry families,” Ton said.
“Any community that has a Rotary Club could access that program,” he said.
Doug Ross is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.