WATCH NOW: Mrvan tours Corps shoreline projects

U.S. Rep. Frank J. Mrvan, D-Highland, spent Tuesday on the beach, but it wasn’t just for fun. He toured a series of U.S. Army Corps of Engineers projects in Northwest Indiana to see federal dollars at work.

At Michigan City’s Washington Park, the Corps placed armour stone — boulders — along the detached breakwater. The Corps also did emergency dredging work for the Coast Guard station, which needed deeper water to do its search and rescue work.

Coming up is work to repair the superstructure in and around the lighthouse. Erosion has caused voids in the structure, project manager Mike Nguyen said. Construction is expected to start in spring 2024.

Trail Creek needs to be dredged, but that’s a complicated project. It was last dredged in 2002 and should be dredged about every six to eight years.

The biggest question is what to do with the dredged sediment. “That’s one of the unique challenges right now,” Nguyen said.

In the 1970s, a confined disposal facility — essentially a landfill — was built and used in Michigan City. It’s now closed. “Those are very expensive facilities to construct and close,” he said.

One of the challenges is ensuring continued funding for long-term projects. Another is deciding what the ultimate destination of the dredged material will be.

“Local partners who work with us, sometimes they can’t give that final answer,” said Timothy Kroll, deputy chief of operations at the Corps’ Chicago office.

The Michigan City Sanitary District can’t guarantee how long it would take to treat water sucked up from the bottom of Trail Creek, said Jeff MacDonald, technical support chief in the Chicago office.

East Chicago already has a confined disposal facility large enough to handle the Trail Creek material, but putting it there would be an environmental justice issue.

“This is one of the hottest real estate markets in the Chicagoland area,” Mrvan said, noting the Double Track NWI project’s impact on Michigan City.

“We do economic development projects that improve the environment,” he said.

His chief of staff, Mark Lopez, said money spent on projects like this pump dollars into the economy when tourists and others spend more money as a result.

Harbormaster Tim Frame said Michigan City Port Authority’s marina has been full for the last three or four years with half of the slip holders from outside the Michigan City area.

Kroll said that when the Corps does dredging projects like this, they work with local officials who often get additional dredging done while the equipment is already mobilized by the Corps. That saves the locals money.

Sand from the recent dredging in Michigan City has been deposited along the Mount Baldy shoreline, mitigating shoreline erosion.

Additional sand is expected to be placed there in 2023.

In Portage, the Corps is conducting sediment sampling.

“The Coast Guard has identified a shoal right at the mouth of Burns Ditch,” MacDonald said. That requires dredging, likely in 2024, MacDonald said. It was last dredged in 2013.

Portage Lakefront Park and Riverwalk, an Indiana Dunes National Park site managed in cooperation with the city, is hard to find, but people obviously do because it’s the most-visited site in the park, Superintendent Paul Labovitz said.

The National Park Service put 50,000 cubic yards of sand on the beach there two years ago, Labovitz said. “I would argue there’s a beach there now because of that sand we put in,” he said.

“We have two distinct starvation areas at the park” where sand doesn’t naturally get deposited on the shoreline. Michigan City’s harbor disrupts the flow of sand to Mount Baldy, and the Port of Indiana affects Portage and Ogden Dunes.

In East Chicago, dredging is expected to resume in 2024. A dike at the confined disposal facility needs to be raised first.

Since dredging there began in 2012, fish have begun appearing in the river, Kroll said.