From the Independent Florida Alligator

The Alligator Editorial Board

In Erin Brockovich style, Gainesville city commissioners and Alachua County commissioners have fighting words for the Environmental Protection Agency: We’re sick of this.

Voting unanimously on a 26-page list of recommendations and critiques of how best to clean up the Cabot-Koppers Superfund site, both legislative bodies expressed disgust with the federal government’s slow response on removing contaminated soil and generally providing a safe environment for area residents.

And we join them. Enough is enough.

The Gainesville wood-treatment-site-turned-environmental-disaster has been listed as a Superfund site for its contaminating effects since 1984 – or before almost every UF student here was born.

Things have gotten so bad that a massive door-to-door study of residents’ health near the wasteland was recommended.

We’re blatantly offended that residents of Gainesville have had to deal with the poisoning infection seeping through the soils left decades ago, which only paints an image more sinister than that of the oil monster in “Fern Gully.”

We’re also left questioning what the point of labeling such a location as a Superfund site does if it’s left to fester for more than a quarter century.

It’s time for the EPA to recognize what Gainesville residents need and deserve. A quarter century is long enough to wait to return our environment to normal. Or at least as close as we can bring the tainted, infected land to normal.