Members of the Superfund Art Project team will address the Cabot Carbon/Koppers Superfund Site issue Saturday and Sunday during the Downtown Festival and Art Show in Gainesville.
The project, which is part of the Protect Gainesville’s Citizens nonprofit corporation, grew out of the “Picturing Ecology” exhibit. The exhibit addressed the issues at the site through art such as drawing, painting, photography and video. Anthony Castronovo, the SAP co-chair, directed the exhibit last spring.
Castronovo, who also works as a part-time professor at Santa Fe College and UF, taught the course “Art and Ecology” last spring at UF.
He said the class had discussed several different options for a project, but everyone chose the topic on the Cabot Carbon/Koppers Superfund Site.
“Part of my push for the class was to look at the local ecology, and immediately Koppers came up as something of an interest,” Castronovo said.
He said the biggest challenge of the project was to interpret the numerous statistics and data that are offered about the site and create art out of it that could actually transmit a comprehensible message.
“It’s overwhelming how much information there is. It’s hard to make sense of it all,” Castronovo said.
According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Proposed Cleanup Plan, released in July, the site originally existed as two separate regions: the Cabot Carbon, which is located in the southeast region of the site, and Koppers, which is located in the west region of the site.
The roots of the water and soil contamination problems for the city started in 1911 in the Cabot Carbon portion, when it began operating as a pine tar and charcoal generation facility. The problems in the Koppers portion began in 1916 when its wood-operating facilities began creosote impregnation processes, according to the cleanup plan.
However, it wasn’t until the 1980s that the site was put on the National Priorities List, according to the document.
Since then, cleanup processes have been underway in order to try and stop the soil and water contamination that is directly linked to the facilities’ operations, according to the cleanup plan.
In 1990, the identified contaminants of concern, which include such hazardous waste as arsenic, phenols and creosote, were reported to be only in the Hawthorn Group and the surficial aquifer. Creosote consists of compounds that are both carcinogenic and non-carcinogenic.
However, according to the USEPA plan, more recent investigations have indicated that the COCs were also present in the Upper Floridan Aquifer.
The Murphree Wellfield, which is operated by Gainesville Regional Utilities, provides the public water supply for Gainesville by withdrawing water from the aquifer.
James Jawitz, an associate professor of environmental hydrology at UF, said he remembers his visit to the site in 1995 and the circumstances that existed then.
“The ditch in the side of the road [on Main Street] had an oily sheen from the site,” Jawitz said. “You would walk around and smell the contaminants in the water.”
He said that an important part of examining and solving the issue is looking at who is driving the process.
“Gainesville Regional Utilities has rattled the cage, and they even got U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson involved,” Jawitz said.
He said that both the residents’ and the operating facilities’ arguments are plausible but added that they will have to meet somewhere in the middle. He said the main question isn’t whether everyone wants zero contamination but rather what the costs and benefits would be of a plan that asks for an even higher degree of safety.
“What no one has agreement on is how much above the zero contamination is acceptable,” Jawitz said.
He added that there is no current risk from drinking the water since GRU has to treat the water and make sure it’s safe before distributing it to the public. Jawitz also said the residents of Gainesville have already paid a lot of money to manage a problem they haven’t caused.
Even though the issue has been a cause for concern in Gainesville for years, many UF students who are transient to the community aren’t aware of the issue.
Mina Quraishy, a first-year health science major at UF, said she has never heard about the problem. She said she would probably read about the site if a shorter, less tedious version of the cleanup plan existed.
“UF students make up a large population of Gainesville so, to some extent, UF is responsible to, if not act on it, at least advocate the issue and make us aware of it,” Quraishy said.
