Local and federal officials said they were not surprised when high water and sand erosion caused a platform near a popular beach at the Portage Lakefront and Riverwalk to collapse, possibly over the weekend, but the storm clouds that caused the damage may have a silver lining.
Portage Parks Superintendent Jenny Orsburn said the concrete, circular platform collapsed when high waves from storms swept away the portion of sand dune beneath the structure. The platform, toward the west end of a walkway leading from a pavilion to the beach, now rests on a slope, while yellow police tape blocks off access a short distance away.
The Portage Lakefront and Riverwalk, which opened in 2009, when Lake Michigan waters were lower and beaches were significantly larger, is 60-acre park owned by the National Park Service and managed by Portage.
“Storms kept hitting it and eroding the dune (supporting the platform), and we were putting more rock and sand to protect it,” Orsburn said. “With the constant wave action, constant storm action and with shelf ice and hitting it over the last couple of weeks, it finally failed.”
“We were not surprised,” she said. “It’s an area we’ve been monitoring for quite a while.”
The collapse is a symptom of a bigger issue, Orsburn said. Lake Michigan has seen some of its highest water levels for several years, decimating beaches, while man-made structures to the east, like the Burns Waterway breakwall and the Port of Indiana to the east, have choked off much of the natural sand movement from the west coast of Michigan to beaches and area to the west, in Indiana, she said.
Representatives from Portage, Ogden Dunes, the National Park Service, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Port of Indiana have wrestled with the sand starvation issues for several years, but fixing the problem, including importing sand to starved beaches, is costly, they have said.
City and federal officials cut off access to the lakefront and riverwalk’s circular platform and the beach last November, as they noticed the rate of sand erosion speeding up, Orsburn said. Those officials will meet, beginning this week, to discuss short-term and permanent fixes to the problem, she added.
Paul Labovitz, superintendent of the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, said officials have been expecting the collapse, but a challenge to preventing it has been the design of the area surrounding the collapsed structure.
The park is not configured to allow heavy equipment to move around the pavilion to the walkway or the beach, Labovitz said, and fixing the sand erosion can be expensive.
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But, the platform’s collapse means officials can take a closer look at the area’s design to see if there’s a better way to keep the area open to the public.
“(Repairs are) going be expensive,” Labovitz said. “Nobody has the money to do it, but at some point, we knew this was coming. The past attempts at trying to patch that were limited by limited access for the equipment to do the work.”
“Arguably, we now have an opportunity to revisit the landscape and design around there.”
Michael Gonzalez is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.