Gainesville Cabot Koppers

13 Sep

Gainesville residents, intended visitors, and those considering residency, please beware! Our city’s heart is black and polluted. Since its creation in 1916, for use as a chemical treatment facility for wood products, especially telephone poles and railroad ties using creosote, the officially federally (EPA) registered Cabot-Koppers Superfund (or Brownfields) site has been steadily and cumulatively chemically polluting Gainesville, to the point where this travesty can now no longer be ignored, having become a serious threat to the very future of Gainesville itself as a once pleasant place in which to live, to be educated, and to do business. Lying just north-west of Downtown, the Cabot-Koppers site is STILL! being licensed by local authorities for the same industrial purpose, but it now uses an even more toxic and carcinogenic “chemical cocktail” known as Chromated Copper Arsenate (CCA). This mix, used to protect “treated lumber”, is now known to present a major danger to Public Heath throughout the entire USA. This, and multiple other such pollutants from Koppers, are officially known to be about to pollute the city’s very own water supply – the Murphree Aquifer. These chemicals also constantly run off into the large Floridan Aquifer via a natural creek system. Moreover, toxic, dioxin-laden dust has only just been officially recognized as being yet another major pollutant, with dire consequences to the health of ALL Gainesville citizens, including students of the University of Florida, which lies a mere 2 miles from the Cabot-Koppers site.