The operator's own July 2026 monitoring shows gas wells across the Shoosmith site well above the temperature its engineers describe as normal. We put those readings on one map together with Swift Creek and Piney Branch — the waterways that bound the site and are the likely routes for anything leaving it.
Landfills produce heat. That is normal, and the engineers who monitor Shoosmith say so in writing: on their own drawings, normal landfill temperatures are 120°F or less.
Their July 2026 map does not show a site at 120°F. It shows two separate bands of exceedance, marked in their own legend:
Wells appear in both bands, spread across the centre and western portion of the site. We now have the operator’s tabulated readings, so the drawing can be replaced with numbers.
These are the operator’s own figures, not ours. They come from the initial temperature column — the reading as found, before the technician adjusted the valve. Where a well was read more than once on the same day we kept the higher reading, which affected three of the 109.
The monitoring record for Shoosmith is spread across separate reports from different companies. Some contain a map. Several — the April leachate sampling report, the gas monitoring reports — contain none at all, only lists of sampling locations.
We consolidated those results onto one map. Then we drew in Swift Creek and Piney Branch. Neither the regulator nor the operator had reason to put them there; their job is the landfill, not the water beside it. But the creeks form the site boundary, and they are where anything leaving the landfill would go. That is the part of this map that is ours.
We are not claiming contamination of either creek. We have not measured the water, and no figure on this page says we have.
We are not applying a regulatory label to the site. The federal operational standard for landfill gas collection requires each wellhead to be run at a gas temperature below 55°C — 131°F — which is where our count starts. But a site may hold an approved higher operating value for particular wells, and we have not seen whether Shoosmith holds one. Whether these readings put the site outside its permit is a determination for the regulator, and we are not making it here. The readings are the operator’s. The interpretation should be too.
And we are not suggesting anyone concealed anything. The map exists because the operator produced it. Our contribution is putting it beside the water.
We will publish the answers here, including any that change what is on this page.