Roughly 1,000 NIPSCO customers across Lake, Porter and LaPorte counties remained without power Saturday night after strong winds topping 45 mph tore through the Calumet region on Friday, snapping tree limbs and knocking out lines in communities including Hobart. NIPSCO president and CEO Vince Parisi personally surveyed work-crew restoration efforts along Main Street in Hobart as out-of-state contractors joined local crews to help bring the lights back on.
The outage count, reported by NIPSCO as of 5 p.m. Saturday, was confirmed by The Times, where reporter Jerry Davich detailed the restoration push. The weekend disruption came as NIPSCO continued upgrading infrastructure in hopes of being better prepared for the next major weather event, following the August 11 derecho.
A Forecast That Warned This Was Coming
The wind event wasn't a surprise. The National Weather Service in Chicago had issued a Wind Advisory for northern Porter County, particularly near the Lake Michigan shore, forecasting northwest winds of 20 to 25 mph with gusts up to 45 mph that officials warned could blow down tree limbs and trigger power outages, according to a notice from the Town of Ogden Dunes. Compared to the catastrophic derecho that hammered the region two months earlier, Friday's winds were relatively modest, but they were still strong enough to leave hundreds of households in the dark heading into the weekend.
Fresh Outages Land Amid an Active State Investigation
The timing matters because NIPSCO is currently under formal state scrutiny. The Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission opened an investigation, Cause No. 46453, into NIPSCO's infrastructure damage, upgrades and restoration challenges following the severe August storms, as reported by WFYI. That inquiry followed what WFYI's report described as the largest power outage event in NIPSCO's history: an August 11 derecho that produced 100- to 110-mph straight-line winds across Lake and Porter counties, cut power to 387,010 customers, and left nearly 95% of Lake County in the dark in its immediate aftermath, with some communities going without electricity for over two weeks.
U.S. Representative Frank J. Mrvan went further in September, requesting a federal investigation by FERC and NERC into NIPSCO's grid reliability. Per Lakeshore Public Media, Mrvan noted that NIPSCO customers had funded roughly $2.3 billion in infrastructure replacements since 2016 and another $81 million for vegetation management between 2023 and 2025, raising the question of why outages keep recurring despite that spending.
Ratepayers Already Feeling the Pinch
Those infrastructure costs have shown up directly on household bills. The Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission approved a rate increase settlement in June 2025 that pushed the monthly bill for an average residential customer using 729 kWh from $136.53 as of September 2024 to $171.27 by March 2026, a 25.45% jump, according to the Citizens Action Coalition. For customers watching the lights flicker out again just two months after the derecho, that bill increase has added an economic edge to the frustration.
NIPSCO's grid is a sprawling operation to maintain. The utility serves approximately 500,000 electric customers across northern Indiana, running roughly 3,000 circuit miles of transmission lines, 66 transmission substations, 250 distribution substations and more than 311,000 utility poles, per figures filed with state regulators and cited by IN.gov. That scale helps explain why even a comparatively modest 45 mph wind event can leave crews stretched thin across multiple counties.
August's Secondary Failures Still Loom Large
Northwest Indiana residents have reason to be wary of secondary equipment failures following wind events. In the weeks after the August derecho, Hoodline reported that an August 18 equipment fire in East Chicago cut power to more than 5,000 customers; an August 20 pole fire in Schererville left about 75% of Dyer without power again, underscoring how stress on a damaged grid can trigger repeat outages long after the initial storm passes. Governor Mike Braun had also issued a statewide disaster declaration and deployed the Indiana National Guard after the August storms, while the Indiana Department of Homeland Security opened applications for up to $5,000 in state disaster relief funds for eligible residents.
Big Investments, Same Week as the Blackout
The outages also landed in the same week NIPSCO's parent company made headlines for a very different reason. NiSource Inc. announced a 20-year energy deal with Microsoft on October 16 to supply 1,100 megawatts of power to a planned Northwest Indiana data center campus, projecting up to $1.75 billion in customer savings over the life of the contract, according to a report carried by Stocktwits. Two days earlier, Indiana utility regulators had approved a framework letting NIPSCO buy and sell energy capacity with its unregulated affiliate, NiSource Generation Co., to support data center power demands, a move that drew pushback from consumer advocates, as reported by Indiana Public Media.
For now, NIPSCO crews, bolstered by out-of-state contractors, continue working to restore the final customers still without power in Lake, Porter and LaPorte counties. Parisi's on-the-ground presence in Hobart signals how closely the utility's leadership is tracking this round of outages, even as the company navigates regulatory investigations in Indianapolis and courts major new industrial customers in the same corner of the state.
