Koppers: just in time for an election!
Our own toxic time bomb!
What kind of city official would claim to have saved a toxic waste disaster for just before an election? Craig Lowe is your man of action. He has been a city commissioner for 7 years, and now he wants to be your Mayor, Gainesville. Cabot/Koppers has been an EPA Superfund site since 1983. And it has still been allowed to stay in business since that time!
Koppers has been a wood treatment plant in Gainesville since 1916. For many years they maintained lagoons full of creosote. This industrial coal tar product has been sinking deeper and closer to the Florida Aquifer. This will eventually pollute our drinking water.
The EPA could have started cleaning this up in the 1980s, but for some strange reason, Koppers has been allowed to stay in business. No one has had the backbone to close them down so a clean-up could begin. Solid majorities of the city commissioners have persisted in letting these poisons run their course rather than shut down a documented polluter…IN GAINESVILLE!
Koppers has also been cited for air-born pollutants, which have been scattered up to a ten mile radius around the plant, which is located behind the Big Lots store at Main St. and NW 39th Ave. Dioxin has been found in the dirt around the Stephen Foster neighborhood and beyond.
Craig Lowe says that only he has the experience to clean up this mess. I guess he has been waiting until he has been on the city commission for 7 years to feel confident enough to know what should have been done 27 years ago. No thanks, commissioner! Your time is up!
Don Marsh, candidate for Mayor
VOTE APRIL 13th!
Look, either you didn’t do your research beyond a quick Google search or your are purposefully lying about Koppers. Fundamentally you are confusing a Federal site with something that a local government could afford to control. The contamination at the site goes well beyond the possibility of a simple overnight “clean up”, especially in the framework of local financial responsibility. Furthermore, for someone who should be defending employers of Gainesville citizens instead of suggesting that the government should shut them down, to suggest that ejecting a business that operates in a well-regulated way on a site that was contaminated by a previous company (admittedly doing roughly the same business but in a far more modern way) is downright un-American! I’m not necessarily in agreement with all previous actions of the local government, but when it comes to Cabot/Koppers, this kind of political jingoism is irresponsible at best.
I am the holder of a Professional Geologist license in the state of Florida, and I approve of every word of this Email.
1Well, gee wiz, Mr. Information Man, you must be pretty mad at Craig Lowe for telling Koppers to leave! He has taken credit for making them close down! Why would he do such a thing? Maybe it should have been done years ago while it was cheaper and easier to clean this up. An engineer at GRU tells me that we would be in much less trouble if that had been started years ago. Go Google that.
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