Indiana Dunes’ eroding coastline stems from the harbor’s proximity. Completed in 1968, the harbor supports ocean ships, lake vessels and river barges along a mile-long berth, carrying steel, agriculture and other products.
Unfortunately, the port’s construction disrupted a natural phenomenon at the national lakeshore. Shortly after the port was complete, people began noticing that some of the park’s beaches were disappearing, threatening the lakeshore’s namesake dunes. This is because Indiana Dunes’ beaches are not static, but ever-changing environments in which winds and waves shift sands from one beach to another over time through a process called littoral drift. Left undisturbed, littoral drift creates a dynamic, yet balanced shoreline in which sands are depleted and replaced in roughly equal proportions.
However, if something prevents sand from following its natural path, the process is thrown out of balance. When the port at Burns Harbor was completed, the structures and breakwaters interrupted the littoral drift process, causing sands to build up on the east side of the port while triggering sands to be washed away on the west side of the port at Portage Lakefront, without any new sand being introduced.
As early as December 1970, the federal House Committee on Public Works requested that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers study erosion along the Lake Michigan shoreline between Michigan City and Gary, Indiana. In 1974, the study area was extended west to Hammond. Called a reconnaissance study, such an effort allows the Army Corps to determine the extent of a problem, explore preliminary solutions, and determine if the benefits of implementing one or more solutions outweigh the costs.
Though members of Congress were swift to authorize this reconnaissance study, they were not so quick to pay for it — and for more than 30 years, nobody initiated it. To address the problem in the meantime, however, the Army Corps applied a band-aid approach, periodically moving sand from the east side of the port to the west side in order to maintain the water depth that ships require to navigate the harbor.
Finally, in 2008, the Army Corps received federal funding to complete the reconnaissance study and finished it in 2010. It determined that the benefits of implementing a long-term solution to shoreline erosion outweighed the costs and recommended taking the next step: completing a feasibility study. Feasibility studies require more detailed planning and engineering than reconnaissance studies, and as a result, they are more costly and often take more time.
Similar to reconnaissance studies, feasibility studies are not initiated until there is funding. Yet, they differ in that the costs are split between the federal government and a non-federal partner, such as a state department of natural resources, a Tribe or a non-profit organization. Finding such a partner can be challenging. As a result, the Burns Harbor feasibility study was not initiated in 2010 — and it still has not been initiated today.
