Gainesville’s Cabot-Koppers Superfund Site – Cindy Harrington Testifies

Gainesville is the “poster-child” for an all-too-familiar national syndrome regarding “Superfund sites”; namely those areas throughout the US that have been so heavily polluted by corporate abuse, misuse, and mismanagement that they have been officially registered as serious hazards to human health by the Federal Government (EPA). Gainesville’s very own, dead-center (pun intended) Cabot-Koppers Superfund site was so designated in 1983. Since then, more than a quarter of a century has elapsed, plus an interminable sequence of studies, re-studies, and corrections to these studies and re-studies of the site, has been undertaken by various entities. Despite all of the play-down-the-problem EPA propaganda (especially EPA’s so-called “community involvement” documentation), which claims that the agency supposedly invites members of the public-at-large to join in the search for the truth about each specific site, and so involves us in finding solutions to the problems, there is now a huge and still mounting body of documentation that demonstrates that reality is quite the contrary; that EPAs “community involvement” is now a well and truly failed aspiration.