Dredging starts Monday night in the St. Joseph Inner Harbor.

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers spokesperson Brandon Hubbard tells us Dean Marine and Excavating, out of Mount Clemens, is performing the mechanical dredging, removing around 18,000 cubic yards of sediment from the harbor. He says with St. Joseph being a major part of the Great Lakes shipping network, it is critical to keep the water deep enough for large vessels.

“St. Joe obviously gets a lot of traffic in terms of different shipping lanes and needing to bring in aggregate and different materials,” Hubbard said. “So as long as they are able to come in at full capacity, business as usual. But as soon as they have to lighten the load because of the shoaling or material in the way, that costs money to the community.”

Army Corps statistics show in 2022, nearly 279,000 tons of material were shipped through the St. Joseph Harbor, much of it for road construction. The Army Corps estimates if vessels had to lighten their loads to use the waterway, the resulting use of rail and truck to transport all of that material would dramatically increase construction costs.

Hubbard says the sand being taken from the inner harbor during this dredging operation will be stored at the Southwest Michigan Regional Airport.

“Basically just a holding site. Maybe they’ll use it for other things in the future, but it’s sediment that has basically like silty, fine material. So it’s not the kind of material that we would normally put on the beach, like we did earlier last month.”

Sand dredged from the outer harbor last month wound up at Lions Park Beach.

Hubbard says the cost of the inner harbor project is more than $900,000, and it’s scheduled to continue through June 30. The public is asked to follow all caution tape, cones, and signs around the project for their safety.