Crawford Generating Station has 2 groundwater monitoring wells, 2 of which have been polluted above federal advisory levels based on samples collected between December 08, 2010 and March 19, 2012. Groundwater at this site contains unsafe levels of manganese, sulfate, cobalt and antimony.
Site descriptionMidwest Generation's Crawford Generating Station and its 2,750 square-foot ash pond were located on a 72-acre site along the north bank of the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal. The site is just a few hundred feet from Little Village, a Latino neighborhood on Chicago's southwest side. Crawford and its ash pond were permanently closed in August 2012 after citizens exerted pressure and several lawsuits were filed over air pollution. The plant had been operating since 1925 and was one of the oldest coal-fired power plants in the country. At the time it closed, the plant's two generating units could generate electricity from both coal and natural gas.
Groundwater monitoring at the site was not required until 2010, following the 2008 Kingston ash spill in Tennessee. In 2012, the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency determined that the site's ash impoundment operations caused groundwater contamination at the site.
For more information about groundwater monitoring at coal waste disposal sites in Illinois, see the 2011 EIP and Prairie Rivers Network's report Illinois at Risk.
For more information about plant coal ash impoundments, visit the Prairie Rivers Network's Coal Ash Map.