INTERVIEW: Mayor Eddie Melton on Gary’s Power Crisis & Indiana's Infrastructure Crisis

SPEAKER_1 (0:03)

The Breakfast Club. We gon finish or y'all done?

SPEAKER_2 (0:08)

Morning, everybody. It's DJ Envy, Jess Hilarious, Charlamagne Tha God. We are The Breakfast Club. Lauren LaRosa is here. We got a special guest in the building.

SPEAKER_1 (0:17)

Yes, indeed.

SPEAKER_2 (0:18)

I don't know if I like him already, because Indiana has done so much damage to my New York mix. Ladies and gentlemen, we have the mayor, Eddie Melton. Welcome, brother.

Eddie Melton (0:25)

Blessings, man.

SPEAKER_5 (0:25)

Thank you so much. The mayor of where, sir?

SPEAKER_2 (0:27)

I just said Indiana.

Eddie Melton (0:28)

No, you didn't. It's Gary, Indiana. He can't be the mayor of the whole state. Gary, Indiana, my bad. I'll take that. I'll take it.

SPEAKER_2 (0:34)

Well, morning, brother. How you feeling?

Eddie Melton (0:35)

I'm blessed, man. Thanks for having me back on the show.

SPEAKER_2 (0:37)

Thanks for joining us, brother.

SPEAKER_1 (0:38)

Now, can we get an update on Gary? Like, where is Gary at today? Like, is everybody's power restored? Are there still families dealing with the aftermath of the outages?

Eddie Melton (0:45)

A lot of the aftermath is still lingering, as a lot of folks know. On August 11th, we had a, it's called a derecho. It was a straight line win ripped through two states, Illinois, Indiana, three counties in Indiana. We lost over 300,000 power outages of customers.

That's throughout three counties. Gary had the largest outage. We had over 30,000 people that was out of power for two and a half weeks.

SPEAKER_1 (1:09)

That's crazy.

Eddie Melton (1:10)

If you can imagine being out of power, it's your home for two days.

SPEAKER_1 (1:13)

Yeah.

Eddie Melton (1:13)

Right? Things change.

You lose food, you're out of work, kids are not going to school.

So one of the reasons I want to come on today is warn folks, utility companies and communities who prepare for these types of storms.

SPEAKER_2 (1:28)

What took so long to get back? Because we had the amount of listeners that we had from the area. Every day. Like we still don't have power, we got generators hooked up, and we're helping our neighbors plug into our generator and we're both getting gas. Like it wasn't one or two, there was a lot of people calling to say, yeah, we still don't have any power.

Eddie Melton (1:48)

So I joined with our governor, I joined our congressman, Frank Morvan. We're launching an investigation. Right now we're investigating with the Indiana General Assembly, the legislature, to figure out why did it take so long? For full transparency, I worked for that company for over 15 years. The power company. Yeah, the power company. I knew exactly what it takes to restore power. So when I realized after the first three or four days, I'm like, wait a minute, I'm not seeing the level of boots on the ground that we should see to restore power. Gary is 52 square miles.

San Francisco is 49 square miles. Right, so we should have had more people on the ground to help restore that power, but also the infrastructure was not invested, in my belief, to the durability. That was a 100 mile an hour wind, straight line, ripped through two to three counties.

Trees were uprooted, destroyed homes, destroyed cars. So they're still taking time for us to clean the city up. It's costing us $20 million just to clean the city up.

SPEAKER_1 (2:51)

I didn't know it wasn't a tornado or something. The wind is that strong.

Eddie Melton (2:53)

A tornado, yeah.

A tornado is going to rip through various neighborhoods. This ripped through the entire northern third of Indiana.

SPEAKER_1 (3:03)

That's crazy.

Eddie Melton (3:04)

And Gary had the largest wind speed.

The meteorologist said 99 mile an hour, some say 126 miles an hour wind. But the infrastructure can only withstand 65 to 75 mile an hour wind. So the light poles you see in your neighborhood growing up, 75 mile an hour winds is going to snap. And we got over 100 mile an hour winds. So that's the infrastructure durability that we got to say, what are you doing to harden the infrastructure in cities? Are you using steel poles? Are you going to cement the poles into the ground? So all of that stuff is important. We got to start asking these questions, especially in black and brown communities.

SPEAKER_2 (3:42)

What took so long though? Because usually, the reason they can't do it is because there's downed trees, a circuit breaker broke or a circuit breaker, whatever, and they had to fix that. So what took so long to get all that?

Eddie Melton (3:52)