Tens of thousands of residents across northwest Indiana and the Chicago area woke up Tuesday without power after heavy rain and strong winds swept through the region on Monday. NIPSCO said about 49,000 customers were out at 10:30 p.m. Monday, while ComEd reported more than 18,000 outages as storms moved through the Chicago area in the afternoon.
By Tuesday morning, more than 28,000 NIPSCO customers were still affected, even after ComEd had cut its outages to about 1,500 customers by 6:30 a.m. The hardest-hit communities included Cedar Lake, Chesterton, Crown Point, Gary, Hobart, La Porte, Michigan City, Merrillville, Portage and St. John, where crews were dealing with broken poles, damaged equipment and downed trees and power lines.
The outages forced at least one school district in Cedar Lake to shut down for the day. The district said all schools would be closed Tuesday, April 28, and the day would be an eLearning day because so many families were still without electricity. It said students would have a week to finish assignments.
The weather added to an already soggy month at O'Hare International Airport, where 0.92 inches of rain fell Monday and the monthly total reached 7.01 inches. That made April the eighth-wettest April on record there, a reminder of how quickly weather Chicago and its suburbs can move from a brief storm to a broader disruption.
NIPSCO said crews were working to restore service “as safely and quickly as possible,” but it remained unclear how long it would take to get power back to everyone. More rain could still fall, and cooler air was on the way, with frost possible in parts of the area this weekend. For many families, the morning question was not whether the lights would come back on eventually, but whether they would stay on long enough to make it through the week.