A group of high school students from Illini Bluffs High School in Glasford in Peoria County was among 10 finalists in this year’s NPR Student Podcast Challenge. In its 8th year, the contest had more than 1,500 entries from 42 states across both the high school and middle school categories for 2026.
The students were recognized for their podcast, A Small Town's Meteoric Significance. It’s about the meteor that smashed into what today is Glasford [a village of about 850 people 20 miles southwest of Peoria] about 450 million years ago — leaving a crater that still has an impact on life in the town today.
The members of the team were Addy Dooley, Lillian Karl, Mallory Stone, Carson Becker, Aidan Bell and Anna Crall.
Illini Bluffs senior Addy Dooley said the team’s interest in the story started when they were in middle school.
“Back in 2021, we got evacuated out of our school because we smelled gas, and it was this whole big thing,” Dooley said. “In reality, it was just Ameren. They release test checks every once in a while just to make sure that everything's running smoothly, and it just has like a sort of smell like similar to gas.”
It turned out there wasn’t any danger, Dooley said, since only the chemical that creates that smell — mercaptan — was released, not natural gas itself. And since that event, Ameren and the school district communicate before test releases.
But because of this event, Dooley and team got interested in why Ameren had the facility in their town of Glasford at all. As it turns out, it’s because the geology is perfect for storing natural gas underground — all thanks to that meteor impact.
“We did the research, and we realized that it was actually this big crater that hit so long ago, and that they now store the gas in that porous rock,” Dooley said. “And so, this was like, wow, maybe this is something we can be known for. We've got this huge crater. It's like a 2.4-mile-long crater, and it's deeper than the height of the Eiffel Tower.”
The crater later became buried under other rock.
What Glasford sounds like
Jade Sewell is an English and journalism teacher at Illini Bluffs High School and was the team’s advisor on the podcast. After hearing about the NPR Podcast Challenge at a conference, she decided to encourage the group to enter the contest.
As part of their research and reporting for the podcast, the team visited their local Ameren facility.
“I think it might be the shortest field trip we've ever taken,” Sewell said. “It felt like we barely left the school parking lot, and then we were already at the gas storage facility, so it was not a really long drive.”
Dooley said the visit to the Ameren facility was a highlight of working on the podcast.
“Oh, that was awesome. So, we went there, and we got to tour their facility, and they showed us all of their machinery. I mean, in the podcast, you can hear like a bunch of different noises that we recorded from the Ameren facility. It's loud,” Dooley said.
Dooley said understanding the story of the Glasford meteor crater required extensive research and reporting.
“We had to learn everything, and so it was so much like researching and taking notes, and then choosing which parts are important to put in,” Dooley said. “It was a relatively short podcast, and so it was choosing what research goes in and what we have to keep out. It was hard.”
Sewell agreed and wanted to make sure that the students were recognized for the effort they had to put in for what, in the end, can seem like a short podcast.
“Going to different sites, talking to these individuals, conducting interviews, organizing interviews, conducting research, and it's exciting to see it all be put together in less than eight minutes,” Sewell said. “But there's so much more, and I just want to make sure that I emphasize that the work that they did was incredible.”
This was the first year Illini Bluffs entered the podcast challenge, and Sewell said she was excited for the student team to be named finalists in their first outing. Amit Biligiri of San Jose, Cal. was the grand prize winner.
