They hoped. They waited. Weeks turned into months. Months became years. They held their noses against the tarlike smell. They wiped the soot off of the side of their houses. They skimmed black particles out of their pools.

They waited. They waited for help from something stronger than all of them put together.

They live in boxy houses on a skin-and-bones street off River Road near the Tonawanda Coke plant. Some of them, like Angelo Sciandra, came because they dreamed of owning their own home, tending a garden, growing flowers in the yard.

They wrote letters to politicians about the smells and the soot from the plant. They held meetings and complained to the media. Still the dark smoke spewed from the stacks.

They hoped and waited and wondered if it ever would change. Last week, finally, their faith was rewarded.

Agents from the federal Environmental Protection Agency Thursday raided the Tonawanda Coke plant. State officials, after long-overdue testing, cited it as the prime source of carcinogenic benzene emissions up to 75 times beyond guidelines. Elusive owner J. D. Crane, the philosophical brother of “The Simpsons” ’ odious Mr. Burns, had for months straight-armed watchdog agencies and paid lip service to protesting politicians. Finally, the feds brought down the discipline stick.

For all of the justifiable grousing about too much government, it is sometimes the only cop on the beat; the only force mighty enough to protect people from the abuses of Corporate America.

“I was at work when I got the news,” said Ann Sciandra, standing Tuesday in her driveway. “I jumped up and screamed, it was so exciting.”

Sciandra is 35, with a firm handshake and a steady gaze. She moved into her parents’ home on Kaufman Street five years ago, after her mother died. It was like walking into someone else’s nightmare. There was the noxious fresh-tar smell, her father’s wheezing, questions about her mother’s cancer and the purgatory of home confinement.

“Even in summer, you don’t want to go out,” she said. “It smells like someone is blacktopping the street. But they’re not.”

For years so-called watchdog agencies have seemed more like the rat-sized canines that Paris Hilton carries around. From the Securities and Exchange Commission’s coddling of the financial world to—as seen in the wake of the Flight 3407 disaster—the Federal Aviation Administration’s chumminess with the airline industry, the guardians at the gate are like parents too intimidated to discipline their wayward kids. We do not pay these people to look the other way. If government does not punish the schoolyard bully, the rest of us take a beating.

When the EPA used its muscle last week to force open the door at Tonawanda Coke, it firmed up peoples’ faith. Plant owner Crane ignored EPA deadlines, blamed evidence of the plant’s pollution on passing traffic, gave the back of his hand to two U. S. senators and never RSVP’d invitations from neighbors. This is America. Nobody is supposed to be above the law.

The EPA will arm-twist Tonawanda Coke into testing what spews from its smokestacks, presumably with the threat of similar fines—up to$32,500 a day—faced by Crane’s Erie, Pa., plant.

“Finally, something is happening,” said Sciandra. “Now we know that [Crane] has to listen.”

This is what government is supposed to do. It is supposed to help Ann Sciandra. It is supposed to protect her 83-year-old father, who cannot stop coughing. It is supposed to watch the backs of everybody who lives in the Dickensian shadow of Tonawanda Coke.

They waited a long time. But the cavalry has finally come.