An August derecho — not a hurricane, not a national emergency — knocked out power to 374,000 homes in northwest Indiana. Twelve days later thousands are still without electricity, and some have been told it could be September before the lights come back. It is the clearest reminder yet that you do not need a national catastrophe for your preps to matter: an ordinary local storm will do it.
On August 11 a derecho — a fast-moving wall of thunderstorms with 70 to 100+ mph winds — tore across northwest Indiana, spawning several tornadoes, two of which crossed out of Illinois into Lake County. At its peak it cut power to about 374,500 homes and businesses around Gary, Munster, and Portage.
Twelve days later, thousands are still without electricity. The utility is targeting the end of this week for most of Gary and Portage, but some residents have been told their power may not come back until September 12. "Twelve days is too long for families to be without power," Gary's mayor said this week.
This never became a national story. There was no hurricane name and no federal spectacle — just an ordinary summer storm and two weeks of families living out of coolers and looking for somewhere to charge a phone. Which is exactly the point.
MyPlann's Grid Down plan sizes your water, food, power, and communications for an outage that runs days, not hours — so a two-week blackout is an inconvenience, not a crisis.
When people picture prepping, they picture the big one: the hurricane, the pandemic, the grid collapse. But the events that most often take your power for days are not national headlines. They are a derecho, an ice storm, a blown transformer, a flooded substation — local, ordinary, and usually over before the national news even arrives.
That is what makes them dangerous. Because they do not feel apocalyptic, almost no one prepares for them. A household with two weeks of water, a way to keep the refrigerator, phones, and medical devices running, and light after dark rides out an Indiana-style outage as an inconvenience. The house next door loses a refrigerator of food, a month of medication that needed to stay cold, and a lot of sleep.
Preparedness is not about the end of the world. It is about the Tuesday your neighborhood loses power — and the store, the ATM, and the gas station lose it too.
You do not need a bunker. For an outage like Indiana's, ready is a short, boring list: water you can drink and flush with, a way to keep phones and a weather radio charged, light, food you can eat without cooking, and — if anyone in the house depends on power for medical equipment or refrigerated medication — a battery or generator that can carry those loads for days, not hours.
We walked through exactly how to size and choose that backup power in a recent issue. The point here is simpler: the time to build the list is the calm week before, not the twelfth day in the dark.
If you have been meaning to get to it, this is your sign. It is happening right now, this week, in the United States — it just is not happening to you yet.
Not sure where your household stands? The Grid Down scenario counts your people, your stored supplies, and your power on hand, then shows you how many days you could actually last.
MyPlann maps your real preparedness level against every scenario in this brief — and shows you exactly what to address first. Free during early access.
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