Beyond Restoration: The PR Lesson in NIPSCO’s Outages

On August 11, a powerful derecho tore through Northwest Indiana, bringing destructive winds, downed trees, flooding and widespread damage to the region’s electrical infrastructure. Hundreds of thousands of NIPSCO customers lost power. For many, the storm itself lasted hours. Its consequences lasted over two weeks.

I recently moved to a small beach town in Northwest Indiana, and while I’ve been lucky enough to avoid the worst of the outages myself, the crisis has still felt incredibly close. I have family in Portage and Hobart who went over two weeks without power, and I watched communities just miles from me turn to social media, neighbors and local organizations for help as the days without electricity kept piling up.

That proximity changes the way you look at a story like this. It's one thing to read that thousands of families and businesses are “still without power,” but another to know first-hand friends and family members who are throwing away groceries, spending hundreds of dollars a week to keep a generator running and trying to figure out how long they can realistically keep living this way.

To be clear, NIPSCO wasn't unresponsive. After the August 11 derecho, the company coordinated with emergency management agencies and community partners and, beginning August 16, hosted several community support events offering meals, bottled water, charging stations, customer assistance and restoration updates.

But those events were concentrated within just a few days. Gary's support event was held August 17, while residents there and in other heavily impacted communities were still facing the possibility of many more days without power.

This is where I believe NIPSCO had an opportunity to do more.

When an outage stretches from hours into days, and then from days into weeks, providing restoration updates is no longer enough. Community support should not have been a temporary addition to the response. It should have become a sustained part of the strategy, particularly in communities where residents may not have the financial flexibility to book a hotel, replace an entire refrigerator of groceries or purchase a generator.

Instead, much of the ongoing support came from the community itself. Neighbors shared resources, local organizations stepped in, and groups from across Indiana and beyond helped distribute food and supplies. Even food influencer Keith Lee came to Gary and used his platform to bring attention, resources and support to residents still dealing with the aftermath.

By August 26, NIPSCO reported that restoration efforts across its broader service territory were substantially complete. But getting the lights back on does not erase what happened during the multiple-week window it took to get there, or the question communications professionals should be asking about what customers needed in the meantime.

In a crisis directly tied to your service, you should not allow outsiders to become the definitive symbol of care. Good crisis PR is not just about explaining what happened, defending the response or telling people crews are working as quickly as possible. Sometimes it means recognizing that, while your team works to solve the problem, your customers still have to survive it.

For Northwest Indiana residents still recovering from the storms and prolonged outages, resources and support are available at https://www.aclu-in.org/indiana-storm-and-flood-recovery-resources/.