One month after violent storms knocked out electricity to hundreds of thousands of residents across Northwest Indiana, federal regulators are being urged to launch a comprehensive investigation into Northern Indiana Public Service Company’s readiness and sluggish restoration response.
In a formal letter sent Thursday to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), U.S. Rep. Frank J. Mrvan, called on the agency, alongside the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), to evaluate whether NIPSCO and its parent company, NiSource, complied with federal reliability standards during the historic crisis.
The Aug. 11 storm delivered 100- to 110-mph straight-line winds across Lake and Porter counties, triggering roughly 375,000 outages—the largest blackout in the utility’s history. For tens of thousands of households, the dark lasted nearly two weeks, hitting communities like Gary, Lake Station, Portage, and Munster especially hard.
“For nearly two weeks, too many Northwest Indiana families were literally left in the dark,” Mrvan wrote in the letter released Thursday. “Families lost food, homes experienced flooding and subsequent mold growth, businesses lost inventory and revenue, and residents lost access to essential medical equipment and prescription medications.”
Scrutinizing Billions in Ratepayer Investments
While a federal Major Disaster Declaration was approved on Aug. 25 and state utility watchdogs have already petitioned for a local review, Mrvan argued that the scale of the failure demands federal oversight.
The Indiana Office of Utility Consumer Counselor has petitioned the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission (IURC) to examine the utility’s response. But Mrvan’s request takes aim at a broader question that has fueled constituent outrage across the industrial corridor: why the grid collapsed so completely after ratepayers funded billions of dollars in reliability upgrades.
“This last point deserves particular scrutiny,” Mrvan wrote. “NIPSCO has emphasized that recent rate increases are necessary to support infrastructure upgrades and improve grid reliability. Since 2016, customers have contributed approximately $2.3 billion toward infrastructure replacement, and $81 million towards vegetation management between 2023 and 2025.”
“Given the magnitude of these investments, Northwest Indiana residents deserve to know why they experienced outages of this magnitude and duration,” he added.
Core Areas of Inquiry
The requested joint FERC-NERC inquiry asks federal authorities to benchmark NIPSCO’s performance against neighboring utilities hit by the same derecho and investigate six focal areas:
- Storm Preparedness: Staffing levels, mutual-aid arrangements, and resource staging prior to the storm.
- Grid Resilience: The structural endurance of the utility’s transmission and distribution systems under high-wind conditions.
- Vegetation Management: The effectiveness of tree trimming and line clearance programs funded by recent rate hikes.
- Restoration Protocols: Why certain urban and suburban communities waited substantially longer for restoration, alongside the utility’s customer communication breakdowns.
- Regional Performance: How NIPSCO’s timeline stacked up against regional power companies that sustained similar hits.
- Capital Auditing: Whether the billions spent on modernization yielded tangible resilience improvements.
Mrvan requested that FERC coordinate its findings with the IURC, state emergency management agencies, and NIPSCO to ensure future electric-grid accountability.
NIPSCO has not yet formally responded to the federal inquiry request
