Northwest Indiana communities spent Tuesday cleaning up from Monday night's storms.
In a Facebook video Tuesday, longtime East Chicago public works employee Eddie Reyes said the damage is the worst he's ever seen. "Like a war zone," Reyes said. "There's branches everywhere. Every block had branches on the ground. Nobody was excluded."
Reyes believes seven or eight homes had been hit by trees in the city.
The East Chicago Public Works Department said its crews were out starting at 11:00 p.m. Monday, and five outside contractors were helping with tree removal.
Mayor Anthony Copeland asked residents to help by collecting branches from their properties. "Public works, they're out there, doing a Herculean effort," Copeland said in the Facebook video. "They're cleaning it up. We ask for your patience."
Monday's storms led to widespread power outages.
NIPSCO says more than 103,000 of its customers were affected at one point. More than 250 crews in total were working on repairs, including mutual aid crews and outside contractors, but with thousands of individual repairs that had to be made, NIPSCO warned that some customers could see a multi-day outage.
The Porter County Emergency Management Agency is asking residents there to report storm damage to Indiana 211. That information can be used to gather data, in case government assistance is made available for storm recovery.
Porter County landowners with agricultural damage should report it to Purdue Extension.
