The area in northeast Madison called Truax Field is home to the Dane County Regional Airport (formerly Madison Municipal Airport), Air National Guard 115th Fighter Wing, Army National Guard and Wisconsin Aviation (formerly Four Lakes Aviation), and is adjacent to Oscar Mayer, the former Burke sewage treatment plant, Truax Landfill, as well as Madison College – Truax campus and the Truax low-income apartments. Truly an environmental injustice hell.
Maria thought of the Truax landfill, where the Current Bridges golf course is (and to the proprietor by Dane County) as “Madison’s secret Superfund site.” This is in contrast to the Madison-Kipp factory which sits on PCB levels of 20,000 parts per billion and is not secret–it’s just not listed as a Superfund site, as most heavily polluted sites like this are not).
MEJO broke the story of the military’s plan to bring F-35s to Madison, and Maria first brought attention to the PFAS contamination coming from the firefighter training practices at Truax for decades and the plume that went under the Truax and Carpenter-Ridgeway neighborhoods to infiltrate city drinking water well #15 in Reindahl Park (which was evidentially closed down).
- See Maria’s four-part Truax landfill series below
- The history of Truax landfill runs through Poisoning Paradise
- MEJO articles about the Truax Landfill can be found here
