LaPorte County

LaPorte County has more vertical in it than anywhere else we cover: roughly three hundred and seventy-five feet between the Lake Michigan shoreline at Michigan City, the moraine crest that tops out north and east of the city of La Porte at better than nine hundred and fifty feet, and the Kankakee flats down in the south. Worth settling while we are here, because it trips people constantly, La Porte is the county seat even though Michigan City is the larger city.

The soils here are genuinely unusual for this state, and it is the most useful thing we can tell you about the ground. The two soils that dominate Indiana, Miami and Crosby, do not occur in this county at all. Not scarce, absent. What LaPorte has instead is Tracy sandy loam over sand and gravel, about a sixth of the whole county, along with Elston, Riddles and Coupee. That is ground that digs clean, drains on its own and holds a slope, and it is a large part of why work here often goes easier than a central Indiana estimate would predict. It also means an estimate carried up from central Indiana will be wrong about this ground in both directions.

Then there are the lakes, and they change how drainage work gets done. Fourteen public freshwater lakes sit in this county and they are true kettles, dug by ice and fed by the sand and gravel underneath them: Saugany runs sixty-six feet deep across seventy-four acres, Hog Lake fifty-five feet across fifty-nine. Deep water in a small footprint. Here is the part that catches people. State law says no ditch or drain may be cut with a bottom below a lake's normal level anywhere within half a mile of any lake of ten acres or more without a permit from the Department of Natural Resources. There is a real exemption, and it is the one that saves most jobs: if the water already emptied into the lake at that same spot before the work and still does afterward, with erosion control in place, the permit is not required. Recleaning an existing ditch usually lands inside that. Cutting a new bottom, or moving where the water goes, usually does not. The reason the statute exists is that these lakes are fed by the sand and gravel under them, and a cut in the wrong place can quietly drain one, so it is worth getting the answer before the machine shows up rather than after.

Along the lake through Michigan City, Long Beach and Trail Creek the material is dune and beach sand, and there is one local trap worth naming out loud. Saugatuck sand carries a cemented hardpan about eight to fifteen inches down and four to twelve inches thick. It is not the whole lakeshore, only a few hundred acres of it, but where it turns up it reads as loose sand from the top and behaves as a sealed layer the moment you try to drain through it, which is how a perfectly sensible plan to let water soak away fails on ground that looked ideal for it. It is worth a test hole rather than an assumption. The northern band is also the only part of the county carrying real clay till, so sand and clay can sit a mile apart inside the same township.

South through Wanatah, Kingsbury, Hanna and La Crosse the county drops onto the Kankakee lowland and the water table comes up to meet you. In the muck ground down there water sits within a foot of the surface from September through June in most years, over loose sand that recharges about as fast as a pump can pull it. Pads and footings mean undercutting the organic material, and how deep depends on which muck you are standing on, since some of it is sixteen to fifty inches over sand and some of it runs past fifty and has been logged to eighty. One caution about the river corridor itself: those long banks along the Kankakee are spoil, cast out when the channel was straightened, and they are dredge spoil pulled out of the channel rather than engineered levees. They should not be treated as flood protection, and they are not stable material to borrow from.

Barn demolition and cleanup work out of the Michigan City side, and drainage work out of the La Crosse and Wanatah country, are what put this county in front of us in the first place. We keep no crew sitting in La Porte. One number answers, we write the scope and the number ourselves, and the work goes to an operator vetted under our name. The towns out here get skipped by anybody who will not leave the corridor. Wanatah, Hanna, Union Mills, La Crosse and Rolling Prairie are precisely the calls this company exists to answer.

Two numbers belong on the table before anybody promises you a pond in this county. Eighty-six percent of LaPorte County rates very limited for holding water in a pond reservoir, and the ground that rates not limited comes to ninety-two acres in the whole county. The main reason is seepage, with slope adding to it on some ground, and it is the same sand that makes the digging so easy. The second number is muck. Nearly thirty thousand acres here are organic soil, more than Lake and Porter counties hold together, and the survey does not leave the consequence to guesswork. Drained Houghton muck is rated for roughly two and a half feet of initial subsidence, the survey putting the range at fifteen to forty-six inches, and for total subsidence of about five feet in some map units and better than twelve feet in others. A pad or a lane laid across that without a plan does not settle once and stop. It keeps settling for years. Then there is the snow. The weather normals put better than sixty-five inches a year on the town of LaPorte against under twenty-seven at Crown Point, about thirty-five miles west southwest, so the winter working window here is genuinely narrower than it is one county over.