三十万家停电，抢修队半夜出去查线，被人开了两枪。一颗子弹卡在座位头枕后面。

Start with a number: three hundred thousand.

In mid-August, a record-breaking storm hit northern Indiana.

The wind brought down trees and snapped power lines, and three hundred thousand homes in the area lost power at once.

August in America is hot — with no power at home, the fridge, the air conditioning and the fan all stop.

So NIPSCO, the power company, sent its repair crews straight out.

This work does not stop for day or night: wherever it is broken, that is where you go.

And before the repairs, there is a first step: which line is down, which pole has fallen. Somebody has to drive it, stretch by stretch, and write it all down.

That step is called surveying the line, and it is usually done at night, because there is less traffic in the day.

At about twelve twenty that night, on a street in Gary, a NIPSCO vehicle was moving slowly along.

Two workers sat inside, looking at exactly how badly this stretch of line was damaged.

Behind the vehicle was an off-duty police officer, there specifically to protect them.

Note this: the protection was already arranged before anything happened.

Which is to say, the company already knew that sending people out here at night carried a risk.

And right at that moment, somebody fired at the vehicle.

The vehicle was hit twice.

Neither worker was hurt.

But one of the bullets lodged behind the headrest of a seat.

The headrest is the part your head rests against when you sit in a vehicle.

Which is to say, that shot missed a person by very little.

A slightly different angle and this story would have been written a completely different way.

The company’s response was blunt: all restoration work, stopped immediately.

NIPSCO said it is not safe to send people out right now; we have to protect our workers first.

The decision sounds entirely reasonable, but it has a cost.

Once restoration stops, those three hundred thousand homes have to keep waiting.

In August heat, one more hour of waiting is one more hour of heat.

And one more hour of things going off in the fridge.

And most of those households have nothing to do with the person who fired the shots.

It was four the next afternoon before restoration started again.

This time it was different: Gary police, Indiana State Police and the National Guard were all protecting the crews.

Somebody had to stand watch before a worker could climb a pole.

Afterwards, the power came back area by area.

The hardest part of this story is not the two shots.

It is this sentence: a group of people going out to bring other people electricity needed armed protection in order to work.

Think about it: when the power comes back on in your home, do you think about what sat in between?