Highway 59 Landfill has 71 groundwater monitoring wells, 16 of which have been polluted above federal advisory levels based on samples collected between March 02, 2010 and November 13, 2014. Groundwater at this site contains unsafe levels of molybdenum, boron, sulfate and selenium.
Site descriptionWe Energies' Highway 59 Landfill is a closed 30-acre ash landfill located in Waukesha, Wisconsin. The landfill was formerly a sand and gravel quarry, and collected approximately 500,000 cubic yards of ash between 1969 and 1978 from the Valley Power Plant. Due to groundwater contamination found in private wells around the landfill, WEPCO (now We Energies) submitted a remediation plan in 1999 to the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. WEPCO removed saturated ash from the northern portion of the site, recapped most of the landfill with a synthetic geomembrane, and covered remaining portions of the landfill with asphalt. WEPCO did not excavate 30,000 cubic yards of saturated ash along the southern portion of the landfill. The remediation plan also included long-term sampling of monitoring wells and several private water supply wells.
The Highway 59 Landfill is listed among the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's proven damage cases, indicating that it has polluted groundwater or surface water at levels which threaten human health and the environment.
For more information on Wisconsin coal ash, see Earthjustice's fact sheet, Coal Ash Disposal and Reuse in Wisconsin.