Bruce Mansfield Power Plant has 75 groundwater monitoring wells, 42 of which have been polluted above federal advisory levels based on samples collected between March 02, 2010 and December 06, 2012. Groundwater at this site contains unsafe levels of manganese, sulfate, arsenic, boron, selenium, barium, antimony, cobalt, thallium, cadmium and lead.
Site descriptionFirstEnergy's Bruce Mansfield Power Plant was a coal-fired power plant near Shippingport, Pennsylvania along the Ohio River in Beaver County. At its peak the facility had three coal-fired units with a total capacity of 2,490-MW. It was first operational in 1976 and was retired in 2019. FirstEnergy’s Little Blue Run disposal facility is the nation's largest coal ash impoundment. At nearly 1,700 acres, it straddles land in West Virginia and Pennsylvania and is completely un-lined. The Little Blue Run Disposal Facility is regulated under the CCR-rule.
In July of 2012, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection filed a complaint and consent decree, finding that the impoundment's seeps and associated discharges to groundwater may present an imminent and substantial endangerment to health or the environment in violation of federal law. This action came 59 days after EIP, along with co-counsel at Public Justice, announced its intention to sue FirstEnergy, on behalf of community members with contaminated drinking water wells and property damage from seeps. The impoundment has also contaminated local creeks and streams with toxic pollution. Under the terms of the consent decree, FirstEnergy has agreed to close Little Blue Run by 2016. In 2012, the Environmental Protection Agency identified Little Blue Run as a location where coal ash disposal activities had been proven to contaminate ground and surface water. You can find the industry-reported data here. For more information on Little Blue Run, see EIP’s 2019 National Coal Ash Report.