Hello Kind and Curious Leader.

Yesterday I asked you to scan the room before you speak, to notice who feels safe and who does not. Today I need to tell you about a room the size of a city, and what happened when the people writing the plan never scanned it at all.

On day ten without power, Carl Brandon stood in a food line at the City Life Center in Gary, Indiana. His block had been dark since the storm. Around him, hundreds of neighbors waited for hot meals and a working outlet to charge their phones. When a reporter asked how he was holding up, he said, "Ain't no sense complaining. Just thank God we're still here."

Sit with the grace in that sentence. Then ask why it was required of him at all.

Here is the record. On August 11, a storm crossed Northwest Indiana carrying winds the National Weather Service measured at 99 miles per hour in Gary, comparable to a Category 2 hurricane. The storm produced roughly 374,500 customer outages, over 60 percent of NIPSCO's entire base, in what the utility itself now describes as the worst outage event in its history. Indiana's State Emergency Operations Center has confirmed at least seven storm-related deaths statewide, including a 58-year-old woman in Lake County, where Gary sits. Schools closed. Wages went unearned. Residents took to social media to find open laundromats and working Wi-Fi, and in the first days they documented the crisis themselves, because much of the national press had not yet arrived.

Nine days in, NIPSCO published estimated restoration times, community by community, across its territory. Gary was initially left off the list.

When Gary did appear, it appeared last. Full restoration for the city was scheduled for 11:59 PM on August 25, a full two weeks after the storm, with Gary and Portage the final cities on the calendar. Gary is a city of roughly 68,000 people, more than three quarters of them Black according to Census Bureau figures, and roughly a third of its residents live below the poverty line. 

Throughout the outage it held the largest number of customers still waiting anywhere in the state.

As I write this, the utility reports 99 percent of the region restored. The last one percent is still waiting, and after two weeks, the last one percent has an address.

I want to be careful now, because care is the difference between an argument and a grievance. The storm was real and it was vicious. Roughly 300 poles needed repair or replacement in Gary alone. A federal emergency declaration was approved. ComEd sent more than 60 workers across the state line to help. Line crews have worked brutal hours in brutal heat, and nobody chose this weather. If you came here for a villain with a mustache, I cannot give you one. Fairness also requires handling the Illinois comparison honestly: neighbors across the state line got their lights back within days, and the National Weather Service says the derecho intensified as it crossed into Northwest Indiana, so the two grids did not face the same storm.

My question was never about the storm. A storm explains why the lights went out. A restoration plan is a different kind of document. Human beings write it. It records choices: where crews go first, whose streets get cleared, whose calls get returned, who sits in the room when the priorities are set. NIPSCO's leadership pushed back publicly on the criticism that Gary sat low on its priority list, saying the damage there was simply the worst, that these are systems being rebuilt rather than repaired. Take the company entirely at its word, and one question still stands: why do the worst damage, the oldest equipment, and the thinnest margin for error keep landing on the same zip codes?

The regulator's own data sharpens the question. According to Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission records, NIPSCO charges the highest electric rates of any utility in the state, at $233.62 per 1,000 kilowatt hours, while holding the worst reliability record among Indiana utilities. The commission has approved NIPSCO rate increases twice in five years. A newly filed class-action lawsuit alleges the scale of this outage was preventable through basic vegetation management and pole inspection, claims the company strongly disputes and says it will fight. Courts will sort the legal question. The civic question is already visible: the highest rates in the state, the worst reliability in the state, and the last city on the restoration list is the poorest and Blackest one the utility serves.

This is no longer a partisan reading, if it ever was one. Indiana's Republican governor, Mike Braun, said the monopoly utility Hoosiers pay every month "has failed to keep its end of the bargain," and he has directed the state's utility consumer counselor to petition the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission for a formal investigation. The state intends to ask how NIPSCO spent what it was given: roughly 2.3 billion dollars in customer money authorized for infrastructure replacement since 2016, and more than 81 million dollars collected for vegetation management over the past three years, according to the consumer counselor's office. NIPSCO says it will cooperate fully. The criticism now runs from the statehouse to the pulpit to the national civil rights community, where Bernice King, daughter of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., said "This is bigger than a power outage in Gary, Indiana."

Residents of Gary have said plainly that they believe race explains the wait, and I will not write around them. What I can add from where I sit is this: when a majority-Black city pays the highest rates in the state for the worst reliability in the state and still lands last on the list, you are looking at structural racism, the kind that never needs a bigot in the room because the decisions were baked in decades before the storm. I am not accusing any individual at NIPSCO of choosing this outcome. I am saying the outcome keeps choosing the same people, and that pattern has a name.

Structural neglect rarely announces itself. It shows up as a list.

While the institution held press conferences, leadership showed up anyway. LaJuan Clemons, who runs the Family Life Community Center and founded the Gary Food Collective in 2020, turned the lot behind his building into a pantry, and told reporters the food was ready before anyone asked, because he had been serving a food-insecure community for years and knew exactly what a crisis would require. Gary's school district handed out roughly 700 grab-and-go lunches in two days and ran out. A mobile pantry at West Side Leadership Academy served about 150 people and ran out. The Gary NAACP organized meal distributions. Indiana University Northwest, its own Gary campus closed by the same storm, opened the one room it could power, turning its library lobby into a public charging station with special hours on days the building is never normally open. Neighbors posted charging locations, delivered ice, checked on elders whose medical equipment needed power. Gary's mayor, Eddie Melton, spent fifteen years working at NIPSCO before he ever held office, which gives his verdict a weight no outside critic can carry: "It doesn't take that long to turn the lights back on." Compare the two pictures: an executive at a podium defending the sequence, and a man in a parking lot who had the food staged before the storm made landfall. Both are leadership decisions. Only one of them required a title.

I almost did not write this. I have a book arriving, clients I advise, boards I serve. I ran the quiet math every leader runs before saying something uncomfortable, the math where prudence always wins. Then I remembered whose state this is. I spent four years in Bloomington. I served nine years on the Indiana University Foundation board. I grew up in Toledo, another industrial town, close enough to know what it looks like when institutions decide a city's best years are behind it and budget accordingly.

Silence would have been the comfortable choice. Comfort was never the assignment.

The reason this essay belongs in your inbox, and the reason it is a leadership essay rather than a news recap, is that every organization you lead has a restoration list. When the budget tightens, when the system fails, when there is less to go around than there is need, someone gets served first and someone gets served last, and somebody writes that order down. It lives in a spreadsheet, a triage protocol, a staffing plan, a queue. Most of the time, nobody with power ever reads it.

Three things I am asking you to do this week.

The lights in Gary will come back on. The list that left Gary off will still exist, in a thousand quieter versions, in organizations everywhere, including the ones we lead. Your silence has a cost. So does your attention. I am asking you to spend it well.

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