Nearly 2,000 Lost Power on West Central’s Old Grid

Nearly 2,000 Indiana Michigan Power customers in Fort Wayne’s West Central neighborhood lost power on Friday, July 18, 2025. I&M logged the outage at 9:45 p.m. and put restoration at 2:30 a.m. The utility later said the outage had been resolved. It never named a cause.

The dark stretch ran through the city’s oldest listed historic district, on a downtown network I&M later described as 1970s wooden poles. The company has since pledged about $34 million to rebuild that network. Construction is not scheduled to start until fall 2027.

A Friday Night Without Lights in West Central

I&M, the American Electric Power utility headquartered in Fort Wayne, told the public the trouble was downtown and that West Central was the neighborhood on the wrong side of it. The company counts more than 600,000 customers across Indiana and Michigan and employs about 2,000 people. On that Friday night, the local map was a single four-figure hole.

The estimated window from 9:45 p.m. to 2:30 a.m. was 4 hours and 45 minutes. I&M did not publish the minute power actually returned, only that crews had cleared the outage. Residents and shops were left to watch the company’s outage map and wait for the lights.

The same week of the calendar had already been rough on the west side of the core. On June 23, 2025, 25 days earlier, I&M reported nearly 1,700 customers northwest of downtown without power, with an estimated restore time of 8:30 p.m. That outage was also later marked resolved. July 18 was larger, later, and sitting on the historic streets that market themselves as walkable after dark.

No downed-pole photo, no storm name, and no equipment note came with the July 18 notice. For a neighborhood of brick streets, restaurants, and live music, the only hard facts were the customer count, the clock, and the promise that crews were on it.

West Central Is Fort Wayne’s Oldest Listed District

West Central grew up west of downtown during the canal era of the 1830s. The West Central Neighborhood Association formed in 1969 around preservation. The local historic district took effect on September 26, 1984, and the same year the area went onto the National Register of Historic Places as the West End Historic District, the oldest historic district listed in Fort Wayne.

The association boundary is larger than the local historic district and takes in a little over 50% of the Downtown Improvement District, so a West Central outage is not a side-street inconvenience. It cuts through homes, small shops, and a share of the downtown business mix. Visit Fort Wayne still sells the neighborhood as a walking tour of founder houses, gardens, and brick streets, with Electric Works, the old GE campus, now sitting on its edge.

WEST CENTRAL STOPS ON THE DARK MAP

• Electric Works: The rebuilt GE campus and Union Street Market sit on the neighborhood’s western edge and draw dinner traffic onto those streets.
• Broadway Arts District: Galleries, small retail, and the corridor that ties West Central to Electric Works go dark when the west-side feeders drop.
• Parkview Field: The TinCaps ballpark is less than a 10-minute walk from West Central, close enough that downtown clusters on the outage map cover both.
• Night spots: Davey’s Bagels, the Abstract, the Brass Rail, and Arena Dinner Theatre are the names the city uses to sell the same blocks that lost power.

Those stops are why an overnight outage in West Central is a different problem from a rural line hit. The streets are dense, the buildings are old, and the evening economy is the point of the place. A four-and-a-half-hour estimated wait is a lost Friday for kitchens, bars, and anyone walking home under dark trees.

I&M Plans $34 Million to Replace 1970s Poles

On March 17, 2026, eight months after that Friday night, I&M announced an approximately $34 million investment to upgrade the transmission network that serves downtown Fort Wayne. The company called it the Eastern Melita Area Improvements Project and said the work would cut the need for frequent equipment repairs and prepare the grid for growth.

The existing transmission lines in the area consist of deteriorating wooden poles from the 1970s.

Indiana Michigan Power, Eastern Melita project page

The current project page, updated after the final route went out, says I&M will build about 3 miles of 69-kilovolt line, rebuild about 3 miles of 69-kV line, and remove about 5 miles of transmission line. All 34-kV lines and stations on the job will move up to 69-kV. New structures are single steel monopoles about 80 feet tall, in a right-of-way 50 to 60 feet wide.

EASTERN MELITA PROJECT SPECS

The substations on the list include Lincoln off State Route 930 at Estella Avenue, Melita at Melita Street and Webster Street, and Anthony at South Anthony Boulevard and Lanternier Street, plus switching sites at the Three Rivers water plant, Omnisource, the wet-weather pumping station, and the INCA tap. Melita is south of the West Central historic core. The point of the job, I&M says, is the downtown network those stations feed.

I&M’s own page is blunt about the wood. It lists deteriorating wooden poles from the 1970s as the plant that is out there now, and it says reconfiguring the Fort Wayne transmission network will give a more reliable flow of electricity. That is the closest the company has come to describing the grid West Central was on when the lights went out.

When Does the Downtown Rebuild Start?

The money is announced. The steel is not in the ground. I&M held an open house on March 19, 2026, from 5:00 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. at McMillen Park Community Center, 3901 Abbott Street, with maps and no formal speech. Landowners were told their comments would help set the final route.

On July 24, 2026, I&M said it had announced that final line route and had sent letters to landowners along it. Michiana Land Services is handling the right-of-way. Construction, the company still says, begins in fall 2027 and wraps up in early 2029.

THE MELITA CALENDAR

1. July 18, 2025: Nearly 2,000 West Central customers lose power at 9:45 p.m.; I&M estimates 2:30 a.m. and later says the outage is resolved.
2. March 17, 2026: I&M announces the Eastern Melita project at about $34 million.
3. March 19, 2026: Open house at McMillen Park Community Center.
4. July 24, 2026: Final line route goes to landowners.
5. Fall 2027: Construction is scheduled to begin.
6. Early 2029: I&M expects the job to be finished.

That calendar leaves West Central on the old poles through 2026 and most of 2027. Even after crews mobilize, the finish date is early 2029. For a neighborhood that already lost a Friday night in 2025, the rebuild is a three-year wait measured from the announcement, and longer measured from the outage.

Later Outages Kept Hitting West of Downtown

The July 18 outage did not close the book on four-figure Fort Wayne events. Storms on April 13, 2026, put more than 1,000 I&M customers in the city on the outage map as the weather moved east, and a local newscast that week showed a large downtown cluster over West Central and Parkview Field. I&M did not issue a separate cause note for that downtown patch in the public posts reviewed for this story.

On June 6, 2026, the company’s own account said crews were looking at a substation outage affecting more than 5,000 customers in eastern and northeastern Fort Wayne. That is a different side of town from West Central, and a larger count. I&M later said the cause was an equipment issue inside the area substation and that power was back that evening.

⚠️ OUTAGE UPDATE ⚠️

Crews are on-site investigating a substation outage affecting more than 5,000 customers in eastern and northeastern Fort Wayne. We will provide an update as soon as we have more information.

Stay up to date at https://t.co/mo2h1eIQcn. pic.twitter.com/nGndebTNul

— I&M (@IN_MI_Power) June 6, 2026

On June 29, 2026, I&M’s map showed around 2,100 customers west of downtown without power at 5:45 p.m. The company had floated a 10:30 p.m. restore time. Power was back by 6:15 p.m., about 30 minutes after that 5:45 p.m. snapshot. The cause was not given.

August 2026 storms again left Fort Wayne as a late pocket. At noon on August 10, I&M said power was back for more than 85% of customers hit by those storms, and that most of the remaining outages were in the Fort Wayne area, with a 4 p.m. target for most of them. Two days later the company was still dating Fort Wayne restorations into the evening.

West Central’s July 18 night sits in that string, not apart from it. The downtown rebuild is the long answer I&M has posted for the core. It does not cover every feeder in Allen County, and it has not started.

What the IURC Counted for I&M in 2025

The Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission’s 2025 electric utility reliability report, posted July 1, 2026, is the statewide scorecard. It splits each utility’s numbers into two piles: including major event days, which are mostly big storms, and excluding them.

With storms in, I&M’s 2025 year got worse. SAIDI, the average minutes a customer was out, rose to 283 from 157 in 2024. SAIFI, the average number of interruptions per customer, rose to 0.97 from 0.84. CAIDI, the average time to restore a customer who lost power, rose to 291 minutes from 187. The company logged 7 major event days in 2025, up from 4 in 2024.

Strip out those major days and the trend runs the other way. I&M’s storm-free SAIDI fell to 83 minutes in 2025 from 98 in 2024 and 148 in 2021. Storm-free SAIFI was 0.71. Storm-free CAIDI was 116 minutes. In a May 19, 2026, summer filing, I&M told the commission it had posted about 45% reliability improvement since 2021, that outages were recovered 30% quicker, that tree SAIDI had improved 54%, and that a four-year tree-trimming cycle was done.

I&M INDIANA RELIABILITY, STORMS REMOVED

Those IURC figures are system-wide for I&M in Indiana. They do not break out West Central or the downtown 34-kV pocket. A company can cut tree minutes on rural circuits and still have a 1970s wooden downtown spine that it has already scheduled to replace. Both things can be true in the same year, and 2025 was that year: fewer routine minutes on the books, more storm minutes, and a downtown rebuild still on paper.

Steel Monopoles Are Scheduled After 2027

I&M’s public line on Melita is that steel, 69-kV, and fewer repairs will steady downtown Fort Wayne. The project page and the March 17 release both say the work is also meant to get the grid ready for growth. The wood stays up until fall 2027. The finish line is early 2029.

West Central will take whatever the existing feeders give it until then. The neighborhood’s listing dates, its brick streets, and its Friday-night businesses do not change the construction calendar. On July 18, 2025, nearly 2,000 of those customers were already in the dark, with 2:30 a.m. on the estimate and no cause on the ticket.

The next visible change on those streets is not a new pole. It is a right-of-way letter, then a two-year build, then 80-foot steel where 1970s wood stands now.