Lake County

Lake County covers more kinds of ground than its reputation suggests. Most people picture the lakefront and the mills and stop there, but the county runs from Hammond and Gary south through Merrillville and Crown Point, over the same Valparaiso Moraine that crosses Porter County, and down onto the Kankakee flats at Lowell and Schneider. That is about two hundred and twenty feet of rise and fall between the shoreline and the high ground in eastern Winfield Township, and the material underfoot changes at least three times on the way.

The water here does not behave the way a map suggests, and it is worth understanding before anyone quotes drainage on your property. Deep River and Turkey Creek run through Hobart and Merrillville, well inland from the lakefront, and they still drain to Lake Michigan. Deep River runs north; Turkey Creek runs east into it above Lake George. The west branch of the Little Calumet runs the opposite direction, west into Illinois and eventually to the Mississippi, and part of that river genuinely flows two ways depending on the stage of the water. The practical version: knowing which way your water actually leaves decides how much fall you have to work with and which agency has a say. The Little Calumet drops somewhere between a foot and a foot and a half per mile and the Kankakee less than a foot per mile, which is why drainage in this county is patient, precise work rather than steep work.

Through the middle of the county, Crown Point, Merrillville, Schererville, St. John and Cedar Lake, the ground is heavy clay till. Ozaukee again, about forty-two thousand acres of it, the most common single soil in the county, with Pewamo sitting in the low spots. The old county soil survey's own language for working it is hard to improve on: highly plastic throughout, difficult to work, compact when wet. It holds water beautifully, which makes this the part of the county where a pond will seal without importing anything, and it fights you on nearly everything else. Shrink and swell on Pewamo is high enough that footings and flatwork have to account for it rather than hope.

North of the Little Calumet the ground stops being soil and starts being history. Large stretches of Gary, Hammond, East Chicago and Whiting sit on made land: slag, foundry sand, cinders, demolition debris and filled marsh. On the lakefront made land at Indiana Harbor, Gary Harbor and Burns Harbor it runs twenty to sixty feet and approaches eighty in places, and the water table across that ground is typically inside fifteen feet. Digging there is an environmental exercise before it is an excavation exercise. Hundreds of state institutional control records cover that ground, many restricting excavation or groundwater use outright, and spoil off a job like that is a waste classification question rather than a hauling line. We will be straight about it: that work belongs to crews who do it every day with an environmental consultant already engaged. If you call us about made ground in the industrial corridor, we would rather point you at the right people than learn on your property.

South of that line it is ordinary dirt work again, and the real constraint becomes paperwork. The county surveyor manages roughly six hundred miles of legal drain, with the statewide right of entry that runs seventy-five feet from the top of each bank of an open drain and seventy-five feet either side of the center line of a tile, narrowable by the board on newer and urban drains. The drainage board meets monthly with filings due two weeks ahead of it. The county also requires replacement storage at one and a half times whatever flood storage a project fills, and its ordinance sets no drainage area threshold on that at all, mapped stream or not. The square mile figure people quote is the state's threshold for a different permit, not the county's. Uncoated steel corrodes fast in nearly every soil in this county, so buried pipe and culvert specifications should not be copied off a central Indiana job. None of that is a reason to avoid the work. It is a reason to have it in the quote instead of finding it halfway through.

Lake County went live because the demand showed up here, not because we drew it on a map first. We do not claim a yard in Crown Point. The number is answered around the clock, the scope and the quote come from us, and the work goes to the network crew that fits it. The rural south of this county, Lowell and Schneider and the West Creek and Cedar Creek townships, is exactly the ground this company was built for and exactly the ground the metro contractors will not drive to.