December 17, 2014
Bill Dolan

Lake County drainage officials committed more than $253,000 for stormwater ditch repairs and maintenance next year.

The Board of Commissioners voted Wednesday to award contracts to Delta III, of Hammond, and R.A. Oros, of Munster.

Delta will clear the Ernie Niemeyer Levee of heavy vegetation from U.S. 41 west to the Indiana-Illinois state line in West Creek Township. It could become uprooted and cause a breach of the waterway’s banks and cause flooding.

Delta will repair a stormwater sewer that collapsed and washed away part of the retaining walls of the Cady Marsh Ditch in Highland.

Oros will reinstall an improved culvert in the Ernie Niemeyer Levee near 241st Ave. and White Oak Avenue in West Creek Township.

Surveyor Bill Emerson Jr. said the county had to remove a previous culvert in the levee that was so small it became a bottleneck during high water. The new culvert will be wider.

Emerson said the county expects to break ground as early as next month on a project to connect the homes of 200 residents of the Hermits Lake and Hawthorn Hills subdivisions to this city’s sewer system.

The two rural subdivisions, southwest of the city, have been polluting south county waterways since the late 1950s. The state repeatedly cited a small, private treatment plant in Hermits Lake with dumping raw or poorly treated sewage into Foss Ditch, a waterway that drains south into the communities of Lake Dalecarlia and Lowell.

The Lake County commissioners took over the troubled Hermits Lake sewage plant more than 20 years ago and have been eager to dump it ever since because of the constant cost of repairs.

Original article can be found here.