NILES — No city of Niles staff saw the intensity of Wednesday’s storm coming, not even Fire Chief Larry Lamb. When he watched the 6 p.m. news, meteorologists said to expect spot storms.

“Well, we got a spot storm, I guess,” he said.

As night began to settle in Wednesday, so did a storm. Its straight-line winds uprooted trees, damaged electric lines and created minor flooding.

According to Indiana Michigan Power, which services much of Michiana’s electricity, some 6,000 Michiana homes it supplies were left without power at the height of outages.

Workers from multiple city departments spent Wednesday night and Thursday removing trees from roads and getting more than 600 homes within city limits back on the power grid.

Only about 45 homes remained off-grid 12 hours later, Lamb said.

“For a small community with very limited resources, a lot less people than we used to have, we came together,” he said. “I call it a five-year storm. We usually have a major type of an issue every five years, and we seemed to handle it pretty well as a community.”

When the storm hit, only one dispatcher was at work. As calls came in about power outages and fallen trees, a second dispatcher and Lamb came in to assist.

Lamb coordinated with dispatchers, utility crews, street department employees, the fire department and the police department to take a triage-style approach to the storm’s aftermath.

“We pull as much resources as we can, and then we try to prioritize as best we can to handle the most severe issues first,” he said.

The first goal of the night was to remove trees from the road to allow local traffic and ambulances through, Lamb said. The street department brought its bucket trucks to remove the trees from the road. The fire department cut up the trees.

Then the utilities department began bringing buildings back on the power grid, working first on primary and secondary lines before moving onto individual lines.

Departments were still working on the Wednesday night storm’s greatest impact Thursday afternoon. The primary service line on Third Street, running from Silverbrook to Michigan streets, was knocked out. Lamb said the line supplies the entire surrounding neighborhood.

“It’s pretty challenging,” he said. “They had to cut timbers to allow the southern portion of the circuit to be energized.”

Lamb credits the utilities crew as the “heroes” of Third Street and the greater aftermath of the storm.

“These guys worked a full shift, and then they went home expecting to go to bed,” he said late Thursday morning. “They still have not been to sleep. That’s the thing the people forget. These people work straight through the night to make sure the city can be back in power.”

As the utility crew tended to Third Street’s electrical issues, Jim Goldsmith, of Howard Township’s Broad Street, was raking up branches outside his home. A tree on his property had split, he said, and a major branch had flown across the street.

Goldsmith said he thinks his Barron Lake neighborhood was the hardest hit by the storm. He and other residents reported minor flooding and toppled trees. More than 12 hours after the storm hit, he and others were still without power.

As he raked, tree removal service trucks drove down nearby Huntly Road, continuing to aid in removing the debris from a short spot storm.

By mid-afternoon, city crews were addressing a new issue. A large tree, damaged from the Wednesday storm, had fallen on the main electrical line, causing outages near downtown Niles.

As of press time, according to Indiana Michigan Power, fewer than five consumer outages remained.