| Additional Information: | Elm Road to Racine Transmission Line Project - Stantec, Inc.
The Oak Creek Generating Site consists of the Oak Creek Power Plant and the Elm Road Generating Station. , The WHPD includes separate listings for the “Oak Creek Power Plant – North Plant” (AHI 246707) and the “Oak Creek Power Plant – South Plant” (FS2, AHI 246708 ). The North Plant was built in 1953 for a single steam turbine-generator unit (later referred to as Unit 1). Subsequent additions, built in 1954, 1955, and 1957, housed Units 2, 3, and 4, respectively. The South Plant was built in 1959 to house Unit 5, with additions in 1961, 1965, and 1967 for Units 6, 7, and 8. Based on the photographs and mapping data contained within WHPD, it is clear that both WHPD entries (AHI 246707 and 246708) refer solely to the North and South portions of the Oak Creek Power Plant (which is one part of the larger, Oak Creek Generating Site). The Oak Creek Generating Site occupies 1,000 acres of land on the shore of Lake Michigan, 20 miles south of the City of Milwaukee, straddling the line that separates Milwaukee County in the north from Racine County in the south.
The four steam turbine-generating units in the North Plant (AHI 246707), commissioned in the 1950s, were retired by the early 1990s. A photograph taken in 1957 shows the Oak Creek Power Plant (now known as the North Plant) with the 1957 addition shown in dashed lines on the left and the location of a proposed addition in dashed lines on the right. This proposed addition corresponds to the first portion of the South Plant, Unit 5, built in 1959.
Photographs taken in 1962 and 1967 show the South Plant (AHI 246708) additions to the Oak Creek Power Plant. The 1967 photo shows the North Plant (with the two smaller chimneys of equal height) and the South Plant (with the taller chimneys of different heights) as it appeared once Units 5-8 were in place. The Oak Creek Power Plant maintained this general appearance into the 1990s when Units 1-4 were retired, and the shorter pair of chimneys were removed.
There is no WHPD entry for the Elm Road Generating Station (the third portion of the Oak Creek Generating Site). The Elm Road Generating Station, located at the northern end of the Oak Creek Generating Site, includes the northernmost of the two extant tall chimneys (a 550-foot-tall chimney, as compared to the visually similar 368-foot-tall chimney to the south at the Oak Creek Power Plant). Construction of the Elm Road Generating Station began in 2005 and first went online in 2010. The Elm Road Generating Station lacks sufficient age for National Register consideration.
A 2010 historic aerial photograph shows the extant 368-foot-tall chimney at south end of the Oak Creek Power Plant under construction (the extant 550-foot-tall chimney at the Elm Road Generating Station, at the northern end of the Oak Creek Generating Site, had been completed a year or two earlier). The two newer chimneys are shown in operation below, with the Elm Road Generating Station at the site of the northern chimney. Historic aerial photographs also show the last two of the four chimneys present in 1967 removed sometime between 2013 and 2015.
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