Thousands of residents recently spent two weeks without power in Gary, Indiana, following a storm that ripped through the majority-Black city. The blackout ground the city to a halt, trapping residents in their apartments, forcing the closure of many businesses and leading to fuel shortages at gas stations. Officials in Indiana estimate…
Page F7From§Eachthe wee small hours edition — 7 September 2026
DTE sends 4,000 workers to Southeast Michigan, weeks after Gary's outage got no comparable rescue
As it ran on the front
Four thousand workers is the kind of number a utility puts in a weekend press release when it wants credit for showing up. DTE Energy says that's how many it had walking Southeast Michigan's downed lines Saturday and Sunday, with most of the thousands without power expected back within days. Days is the number the company chose to say out loud, and days is what the receipts show it delivering.
Three weeks earlier, a storm of the same season tore through Gary, Indiana. The count that mattered there ran differently: two weeks without power, not days — and that figure comes from residents describing what already happened, not a target anyone was racing toward. People were trapped in their own apartments. Gas stations ran dry. Businesses closed for the duration. Indiana officials put the storm damage at up to $5 billion, a figure large enough, on paper, to justify almost any workforce a utility wanted to send.…
…(cont) Gary is majority-Black. Its mayor, describing the aftermath, said "we're still in the recovery phase, as we speak" — present tense, ongoing, no finish line attached to the sentence. Southeast Michigan got a finish line inside the first announcement: days, the company said, not weeks, not an open-ended "phase."
Nobody has filed the paperwork that would explain the difference in clocks. No order names the workforce dispatched to Gary, if a workforce was dispatched at that scale at all. No rate case sitting anywhere in these records spells out why one outage drew four thousand hands within a weekend and the other drew a mayor still narrating recovery two weeks in. This isn't a comparison of two balance sheets — nobody has produced those, and I won't pretend to have read filings that aren't in front of me. It's a comparison of two outages, same season, same country, with two different clocks starting from the first dark hour.
One clock reads in days. The other clock, as far as the record shows, is still running — "as we speak" doesn't come with an end date, it comes with a mayor hoping the next update is better than the last one. The storm didn't check a map before it knocked out the grid in either state. Whatever decided which zip code got four thousand workers by the weekend and which one got an open-ended "phase" did check something, hon, and it wasn't the wind speed.
“Four thousand trucks roll into one town by the weekend and a whole other city gets weeks of "recovery phase" and a mayor still talking in present tense — that's not two different storms, that's two different answers to the same question: who gets picked up first. Nobody's filing paperwork on that gap because the gap isn't a mistake, it's the system working exactly the way it's built to work. Gary's still waiting on lights while Michigan's already counting its trucks.”
“Look, you can't just line up two totally different weather events and call it a pattern — DTE had four thousand workers staged and ready, that's just good planning, that's not a statement about anybody else's planning. As for what happened in Indiana, we don't have the full picture on their resourcing, so it's premature to— did I say premature? I mean, these things take time, every storm's different, that's really all I'm saying here.”
The receipts
DTE Energy says around 4,000 utility workers were focused on restoring power to thousands of Southeast Michigan residents on Saturday and Sunday.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.