During a recent City Council meeting in the pavilion at the Portage Lakefront and Riverwalk, dozens of people trudged to and from a strip of National Lakeshore beach directly west.
A few miles to the east, thousands of men and women worked on ships and barges and in steel- and agriculture-related jobs at the Port of Indiana Burns Harbor for companies that pay Porter County almost $4 million a year in property taxes.
To the west of the pavilion, the owners of lavish homes — some of the properties assessed at or beyond $1 million — enjoyed their lake views and access to the remainder of a beach that once stretched for hundreds of yards.
Lake Michigan water has risen and fallen, like a living, changing organism, but there is little doubt the combination of rising water and manmade structures has created a problem.
Soon, there may be plans to stop the potentially devastating effects of beach erosion, also called sand starvation, but getting to a consensus on what to do and who should pay for immediate and long-term solutions shifts like the sand beneath dozens of structures along the shoreline.
A House On Sand
Before he sold his chain of 33 cellphone stores, Lou Gagliardi bought a third of an acre of what seemed like prime lakefront property in Odgen Dunes.
In 2004, Gagliardi built a lavish, 9,100-square-foot, two-and-a-third story home for his wife and four sons a beach away from the gleaming Portage Lakefront and Riverwalk Pavilion. The Gagliardi home has 20 tons of steel in the foundation and structure. Soaring Pella windows in his kitchen and dining room offer expansive views of the lake, with boats coasting hundreds of yards off-shore and people paddle boarding across what used to be sand.
“It’s our own little piece of heaven, as I see it,” Lou’s wife, Patty Gagliardi, said.
Beyond his 110 feet of frontage, “I had a football field of beach” before hitting Lake Michigan, Gagliardi said. And, directly to the east, Gagliardi said his property was level with the National Lakeshore beach.
Since then, the Gagliardis have watched the lake devour the beach north of their property and house, assessed by the county at about $1.3 million, and its water now laps up 30 feet past the northern boundary, on a beach they say has dropped by at least 10 feet due to erosion.
No one knows what another major storm, like the one that decimated area beaches on Halloween night 2014, will do to his seawall or the house behind it. That night, a violent early winter storm pounded the Gagliardi home and the nearly 70 other residences along Ogden Dunes’ beach.
“I’m here watching seven-foot waves coming over my property that night” he said. “At one point it was so bad, I told my wife to start packing the things you think are important.”
The storm traumatized the family, especially their younger sons, with the youngest insisting on taking his two favorite toys to school in his backpack all last school year, in case they had to evacuate, Patty Gagliardi said.
The Gagliardis also have to think about transporting her elderly parents, who live in the big house with them.
“We live with all of our stuff ready to leave,” Patty Gagliardi said. “And it hasn’t been a week. It’s been a year-and-a-half.”
If there was a problem on the prime property, there were no warning signs or government notices of potential problems, and maybe there should’ve been, nor did the family know about the lake’s erratic water levels, Gagliardi said.
“I wasn’t aware of all the stuff that was going on, but if people knew it, they should’ve said this lot is not buildable,” Gagliardi said.
Balancing nature and commerce
Northwest Indiana leaders and industrialists have long worked to balance protecting a beautiful shoreline while providing work for tens of thousands of residents on a large shipping port and steel mills along the lake.
The discussion became a debate, and the debate eventually became law in the 1960s. A series of Congressional acts, culminating in law in 1965, ultimately created the thousands of acres of the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, a hugely popular national park, and left room for development like the Port of Indiana-Burns Harbor.
Until then, Indiana was the only state on the Great Lakes that had no major shipping port, said Jody Peacock, vice president of the Ports of Indiana, a state agency which operates shipping ports in Burns Harbor and along the Ohio River in Mount Vernon and Jeffersonville.
The idea was relatively simple: Indiana’s lakeshore would be divided into room for a shipping port at Burns Harbor and up to two integrated steel mills and room for natural development and recreation.
Work began on the Burns Harbor site in 1967, and the port welcomed its first ship in 1970, Peacock said. The Port includes a break water reaching about 7,000 feet from the shore and forming the northern edge of a federal shipping harbor, maintained by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
The Burns Harbor port, at 600 acres, is home to 30 businesses, half of them steel related, and, along with welcoming international traffic, it provides water access for river barges through Illinois, to the Mississippi River and to the Gulf of Mexico, Peacock said.
The Burns Harbor port businesses provide about 32,500 jobs, generate about $3.9 million in property taxes each year to boost the coffers of the City of Portage and local schools, libraries, townships, the airport authority and the county.
There also is an environmental benefit, Peacock said. According to port documents, one towboat with a 15-barge tow is the equivalent of 239 rail cars and 1,050 semitrailers. One 1,000-foot Great Lakes ship can replace 564 rail cars and 2,340 semitrailers.
But, another environmental impact of the long port break water and harbor, and of the cold water intakes and bulkheads for steel mills and a NIPSCO plant to the east of the harbor, is the build-up of sand to the east of the structures.
That sand blocks cold water intakes for steel mills and NIPSCO, and it adds to the sand starvation and beach erosion of beaches, like the Portage lakefront and communities, Ogden Dunes, down current.
That sand starvation surprised no one, said Jim Combs, a general contractor, a longtime resident of Ogden Dunes and a dogged researcher of the impacts of manmade structure on beach erosion.
‘We are victims’
A resident of Ogden Dunes since 1959, Combs, who lives in a large Ogden Dunes house built mainly by his father at a time when there were hundreds of feet of beachfront, began researching the development of the lakeshore around 1986.
He’s filled a briefcase and several crates with copies of laws, studies and other documents detailing the recreation-industry balance on the lake.
“We don’t have all the sand we used to have,” Combs said. “The Port of Indiana was built, and the port blocks the littoral flow of sand which nourishes our beach. There’s absolutely no beach in some places in front of Shore Drive.”
Throughout the years, the state, through its Department of Natural Resources, has intervened, at times, helping to build sheet metal walls on properties to protect against the lake’s battering waves or allowing large rocks, called toe protection, to be piled up in front of houses to dissipate the energy of high waves.
But, more needs to be done, Combs said.
For several years, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, ArcelorMittal and NIPSCO have been dredging hundreds of thousands of cubic yards of sand from the federal harbor at the Ports of Indiana-Burns Harbor and the companies cold water intake sites, filling barges and moving that sand to piles several hundred feet offshore of Ogden Dunes.
The sand is then dumped into piles, but no system is in place, yet, to move the sand from the piles to the beach, nor is there agreement on who would pay to move it, Combs said.
The idea was to put sand in a place where the lake’s natural currents would help littoral drift.
Combs also spent significant time discussing House Document 160, which became the law establishing the Ports of Indiana’s presence and the need for national lakeshore protection. In the document, the state agrees to hold the U.S. harmless for damages caused by the development of the port.
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Part of those damages are the effects of beach erosion, and the state should be responsible for paying for the temporary fix, which is getting sand from the piles to the beaches, Combs said.
“(The state) can’t even put a million dollars into putting sand on the beach?” he asked. “It’s so costly to pursue those things. The lawyers are the only ones who win.”
The beach erosion problem is exacerbated by difficulties in getting federal officials to allow homeowners to get permits to build more walls in front of their properties or dump huge stones there to ease the power of Lake Michigan’s waves, he said.
The DNR already has issued permits for the extra protection, but the homeowners have been blocked by National Park Service officials, Combs said. That extra protection could mean the difference between protecting the houses and watching them disappear into the lake, he said.
The dire scenario is not just talk. To the east in Beverly Shores, there are no longer lakefront houses on the north side of Lake Drive. Many of them washed away.
The National Park Service bought the remaining houses from residents and removed the homes, Combs said.
“We’re victims,” Combs said. “I’ve planned to be here, in this house, until I die. Now, I’m not sure that’s going to happen.”
‘Nature always wins’
Paul Labovitz, a 28-year veteran of the National Park Service, said he understands a permit to build extra walls or dump large rocks in front of the Ogden Dunes homes may offer some relief to the residents, and Labovitz said he feels for them.
But the superintendent of the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore has more than the residents to consider when deciding what to do with the lakeshore and how to spend tax dollars.
In 2014, the National Park Service released the results of a three-year study, costing taxpayers about $300,000, on shoreline management from Michigan City southwestward toward Gary.
The study contained revealing images of how much beach erosion has occurred in some areas and the results of sand piling up in other areas due to Lake Michigan water level fluctuations and, just as importantly, the effects of manmade structures.
“We basically reaffirmed the structure causing the starvation to the west, and we proposed a couple of different ways to mitigate that,” Labovitz said.
A pumping system that could move 70,000 cubic yards to 100,000 cubic yards of sand from east of the Port to Portage and Ogden Dunes would be ideal, Labovitz said, but the study also indicated it would cost about $25 million over the years.
In the meantime, paying to move sand from piles in the lake to houses on the beach or for relief for the Ogden Dunes residents is highly unlikely, Labovitz said.
Labovitz said he is against adding more stones or steel walls in front of the Ogden Dunes houses, even if it’s on property controlled by the National Park Service. That would only block more sand from moving to West Beach, one of the National Park Service’s most popular swimming areas in Indiana.
The most effective way to deal with beach erosion, whether caused by natural changes in water level or manmade structures, is to get out of nature’s way, he said.
“We would never have $1 million laying around unless Congress said, ‘Here’s $1 million for sand,’ and that’s highly unlikely,” Labovitz said.
The most effective way to deal with beach erosion, whether natural or manmade or both, is to get out of nature’s way, Labovitz said.
Lake cycles and history
The lake water levels rise and fall unpredictably, and putting rocks or structures in front of the homes on Ogden Dunes would help, temporarily, to control the erosion caused by natural and manmade forces, but the parties discussing solutions to beach erosion should have a better understanding of the lake, one expert said.
Stephen Davis, Lake Michigan specialist for the Indiana Department of Natural Resources, has spent 30 years studying winds, waves and shoreline and sand movement along the lake, and, in his Michigan City office, he moved deftly through a pile of satellite images, monthly Great Lakes water level bulletins, charts and graphs.
On one chart, plotting monthly average Lake Michigan water levels from 1960 to 2016, as measured in six gauges across the lake, a thin, black line skyrockets and plummets erratically, representing water-level rises and falls.
The difference of a few feet in water levels can be dramatic. The lake now has risen about four feet since its lowest levels, well above the average rise, Davis said.
“If there were true cycles, you’d be able to predict when Lake Michigan is going to go up and down, and as far as I know, we don’t know what the lake levels are going to do,” Davis said. “They were just low from 1999 to 2014, and then Lake Michigan went up in 2015 and 2016.
“So, when people start asking me questions like, ‘Well don’t we have cycles and know what the lake is gonna do?’ well, we don’t know.”
According to available records, the lake’s highest water level on record happened in October 1986, when it was 582.35 feet above sea level. The lowest level on record was January 2013, when the water level sank to 576.02 feet.
However it’s done, moving more sand onto eroding beaches helps, Davis said.
“You’re basically extending the life of the beach nourishment by putting it up on the beach,” he said. “If you put sand in the lake, 100 percent can move down drift, but if you put it on the beach, that sand is available to absorb wave energy into the Portage lakefront beach for a long period of time.”
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineer did just that about 13 years ago, Davis said. The Corps pumped a sand-water mix from the Burns Harbor ditch that feeds into the Portage Lakefront and Riverwalk, shoring up the National Lakeshore beach for almost 10 years.
But, federal officials later found the action brought unwelcome pollutants, sediments and invasive species of plants and other organisms on the beach.
Nature will have its way, said Zoran Killibarda, chair of the geosciences department at Indiana University Northwest. Killibarda has been studying sand, dunes and shoreline movement along the Indiana dunes for a decade.
Manmade solutions to manmade problems cannot change the lake, he said.
“All the efforts the Corps is doing, it temporarily helps, but it’s only one season or half a season,” he said, identifying strata in a sand dune that demonstrated how sand has piled up along the Portage lakefront through different weather events over the years. “Sometimes, its best to leave nature to do its thing and then start adjusting whatever is eroded. Some houses will be gone, but you were not supposed to put houses there.”
Finding solutions
In a July City Council meeting, Portage Mayor James Snyder spoke of the beach erosion issues and plans to fix the problem. He spoke of entities studying and working together, collaborating to start a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, or USACE, feasibility study to “assign blame” to the parties whose structures led to the beach erosion.
“What used to be finger-pointing has turned into collaboration,” Snyder said later, during a discussion at the lakefront park. “We have set the standard that that’s not going to happen anymore. We’re going to get in a room. We’re gonna not point fingers at anybody. We’re gonna figure this out.”
A year ago, many of the stakeholders met at the Woodland Park conference room in Portage to try to reach a solution, or at least get some consensus on the issues.
Portage and Ogden Dunes have agreed, through non-binding letters of intent, to be the non-federal sponsors for the feasibility study on ways to ease the beach erosion in their municipalities.
From homeowners like Gagliardi and Combs to city and town and federal leaders and the Ports of Indiana, much talk of a long-term solution of pumping a sand-water slurry from points east of the Burns Harbor port, through a pipeline embedded in the lake to the beaches suffering erosion further down current toward Portage and Ogden Dunes.
Jody Peacock, of the Ports of Indiana, said he and others also are investigating other concepts to ease the erosion down current. One idea is similar to the restoration of the Cat Islands, near Green Bay, Wis. There, sand dredged from the Green Bay shipping channel was used to rebuild the islands decimated by erosion.
The idea, which could aid in more naturally moving sand to sand starved locations, is one that will be presented to the U.S. Army Corps, Peacock said.
David Bucaro, a U.S. Army Corps engineer, said the agency completed one study in 2010 to determine if there is a solution to the beach erosion that can be economically justified and to determine if fixing the problem fit within the Army Corps’ mission.
The answer was yes to both questions, but entities, such as government agencies, have to pick up the tab for about 50 percent of such studies, about $850,000 of the expected $1.9 million cost.
The study is expected to last three years.
If the local parties can come up with their share, the Army Corps study will have three major tasks, Bucaro said. The first will be to estimate what past, present and future effects the manmade structures up current have had on the movement of sand to the south and west.
Next, the study will look at how much sand and sediment will have to be moved. In April 2012, two ships ran aground at the federal harbor at the Port of Indiana-Burns Harbor due to high sand that had built up, or shoaled, in the harbor, sand that otherwise would have moved to the Ogden Dunes and Portage beaches.
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“It really was a wake-up call for the Corps and the port on where shoaling is occurring,” Bucaro said.
Finally, depending on the results of the first two tasks, the study will assign proportionate damage costs to the parties involved.
Completing the study is important, but even if work is deemed feasible, it must be compete with other projects and budgeted, planned and approved, which could take more years.
Much attention has been turned toward the Northwest Indiana Regional Development Authority. The RDA board will consider the local share request at its August meeting.
The RDA has a long-term interest in the lakefront area, with plans to build “connectivity,” making the area easier to access and improving transportation throughout the area, said RDA Executive Director Bill Hannah.
The RDA has a strong interest in the Portage lakefront beaches, he said. The agency provided $10 million to improve the Portage Lakefront and Riverwalk area almost 10 years ago, but, like the National Park Service, the RDA has to consider how it would get the biggest bang for taxpayers’ dollars, Hannah said.
“When I look at it, do I have concern for those homeowners? Sure, on a personal level, I really do,” he said. “But, I’m looking at what’s going on in the shore, in general.”
If a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers study happens, and if a strong, permanent solution is chosen, it can not happen soon enough for the Gagliardis.
“I don’t want to move, but I can’t live like this,” said Lou Gagliardi.
Michael Gonzalez is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.