Thousands of Northwest Indiana residents may remain without power for several days following last week’s deadly storms that caused outages statewide.

NIPSCO, Indiana’s utility company, reported that over 60% of its customers, or approximately 370,000 homes, lost power during the Aug. 11 storm following several days of severe weather, according to The Chicago Times.

As of Thursday morning, more than 63,000 NIPSCO customers in Northwest Indiana remained without power. In Gary, between 22,000 and 38,000 customers were affected and still have no electricity, according to The Chicago Times, ABC 7 Chicago, and CBS News.

NIPSCO initially provided restoration timelines for several Northwest Indiana areas but did not include Gary. As of Thursday morning, the company’s website indicated that power may be restored to affected Gary residents by Tuesday, following more than a week without service.

Many Gary residents have spoken out about the situation, noting how the city is often forgotten.

“That’s ridiculous. It’s unacceptable. They need to do better,” Bridget Sanders told CBS News. “We are being left behind every time something goes on. Gary is left behind. We are the last ones on the totem pole to get anything done.”

Why are Gary residents still without power?

Gary has the largest number of customers in the state without power. During a press conference on Wednesday, Melody Birmingham, the group utilities president at NiSource, NIPSCO’s parent company, said it’s taking longer to restore power because the city faced the most “extensive and complex damage” from the storm and high winds across Northwest Indiana knocked down trees.

“Those winds were as strong as a Category 2 hurricane,” Birmingham said, per The Chicago Times.

Utility crews have been working overtime to repair more than 300 power poles that were damaged during the storms. They also conducted an extensive damage assessment of more than 2,000 miles of power lines while dismissing social media claims that the work was related to race and socioeconomic status, per ABC 7 Chicago.

“These aren’t simple repairs. These are lines that ordinarily take us, and systems that ordinarily take weeks or months that we are trying to accomplish in days or weeks,” Birmingham said.

Relief efforts underway across the Midwest

The recent storms have left many Northwest Indiana residents, including those in Gary, without power and essential resources such as food and water.

“We have no gas, no restaurants, no power. Now, we had to throw away everything [away]… [and at] night is like Gotham City. You can’t see anything,” Gary resident Brittany Bankhead told ABC 7 Chicago.

Several groups have teamed up for food giveaways this week across East Chicago.

The prolonged outage has been particularly difficult for Gary’s predominantly Black population, with residents describing challenges ranging from food insecurity and unsafe conditions to housing instability, according to the Atlanta Black Star.

Another Gary resident who was already displaced after a June tornado destroyed her home was staying with family in a one-bedroom apartment while awaiting additional help.

“This is Gary, Indiana—the hometown of Michael Jackson—but many of us have felt invisible. We need people outside of Gary to know what is happening here,” Raven Summers told Atlanta Black Star.

Meanwhile, food critic and popular social media personality Keith Lee will be visiting Gary this weekend as part of his Midwest food tour, per CBS News.