Joseph S. Pete

The BP Whiting Refinery is going back online after suffering heavy flooding during last week's storms.

The sprawling refinery along the Lake Michigan shoreline in Whiting, Hammond and East Chicago reopened a street outside its gates and is bringing in its boom from Lake Michigan.

Workers said units started to come back online Monday after the storm and flooding caused a power outage a week earlier. The supply-side industry market intelligence service IIR said the refinery should again be fully operational within a day or two.

The outage at the 440,000-barrel-per-day refinery caused gas prices to spike throughout the Upper Midwest, including by nearly 20 cents per gallon in Northwest Indiana.

BP declined to comment on production levels but gave an update on how operation

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