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.

High winds brought down trees and snapped power lines; three hundred thousand households in the area lost power at once.

August is the hottest stretch of the American year, and losing power at home means the fridge, the air conditioning and the fans all stop.

So the power company sent its repair crews out immediately.

This work runs day and night: wherever it is broken, that is where you have to feel your way to, and much of it happens in the small hours.

And before any actual repair, there is a step: surveying the line.

Which stretch is down, which pole has fallen, which is just a tree lying across it — somebody has to drive it section by section and record it clearly.

That step is usually scheduled for late at night, because there is less traffic and you can see it better.

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

Two workers sat inside, and their task was to get a clear picture of exactly how badly this stretch of line was damaged.

Behind the vehicle was an off-duty officer on a security detail, there specifically to protect those two people.

This detail is worth stopping on: the protection was already arranged before any shot was fired.

Which is to say, the company had already judged that sending people into this area late at night carried a risk, and assigned an officer accordingly.

And it happened anyway.

Right at that moment, somebody fired at the vehicle.

The body was struck in two places.

Neither worker was hurt.

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

The headrest is the piece the back of your head rests against when you sit in a vehicle.

Which is to say, that shot came very close to the back of a person’s head.

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

The company’s response was extremely direct: all restoration work, suspended immediately.

The reason was stated plainly: it is not safe to send people out now, and the workers have to be protected first.

You cannot fault the decision, but it has a cost, and the cost lands on other people.

Once restoration stops, those three hundred thousand households still in the dark can only keep waiting.

In August heat, one more hour of waiting is one more hour of heat; and one more hour of the fridge spoiling.

And the overwhelming majority of those three hundred thousand households have nothing to do with the person who fired.

They simply live in the area, and then wait along with everyone else.

It was four the following afternoon before restoration began again.

The conditions had changed: Gary police, Indiana State Police and the National Guard together provided escort and security for the crews.

Which is to say, before a worker could climb a pole, somebody had to be standing below watching for him.

After that, the power came back area by area.

The most uncomfortable part of this story is not the two shots.

It is the sentence it finally comes down to: a group of people going out to deliver electricity to others needed an armed escort in order to start work.

Think about it: the second the power comes back on in your home next time, will it occur to you that something like this might sit in between?