Nearly two weeks after a summer derecho knocked out power, tens of thousands of people in Gary, Indiana were still without power, with many taking to social media to highlight the reality of living through a prolonged blackout. While the utility made excuses, the data centers that powered the community’s social media presence were humming along, built on a very different assumption: that the power MUST stay on.

And, if you tilted your head just so, that humming might have sounded like a warning.

According to initial reports from NW Indiana utility NIPSCO, nearly 370,000 people were left without power in the immediate aftermath of the derecho that tore through Gary, Indiana on August 11th. As of August 20th, more than 63,000 were still without power.

“As a result of there being no power, children have not been in attendance at school and some workers have not been able to work,” wrote Sherdell Baker, for Ebony. “In addition to having to drive in pitch-black darkness.”

As of this morning, power was restored to “nearly all” Gary residents, but vven with the lights in their homes back on, those residents have lots of questions about the data centers in Gary. Data centers which, according to some reports, never lost power. An Instagram creator calling herself victoria_phd has a great post about this – it starts off a bit conspiratorial, but gets to the part about the proliferation of data centers in the region and the role Indiana residents believe they played in the prolonged outage soon enough.

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