From: Arkansas Times
It's all fun and games until the world's richest corporation spills 200,000 gallons of goop in your backyard.
Two weeks ago, it might have been hard to imagine sleepy Mayflower,
population 1,631, at the center of a growing international debate over
corporate influence, the multi-billion dollar Keystone XL pipeline
project and the environment. That was before ExxonMobil's Pegasus
Pipeline burst in the backyard of a middle-class house in the Northwoods
subdivision there on March 29. Though the site around the breach was
soon clamped down tight, video and photographs taken just after the
rupture show a black horror emerging from behind houses and pouring over
perfect lawns before snaking down the gutters of Starlite Drive like
something out of a nightmare. An Exxon spokesperson said the current
estimate is that 5,000 barrels of Wabasca heavy crude — or 210,000
gallons — spilled from the breach.
From there, at least some of the crude went into the storm drains and
ditches, crossed under Interstate 40, and drained into a sensitive
wetland area and a picturesque, nameless cove, lined with fishing
cabins, that lies south of Highway 89. That cove connects to the main
body of Lake Conway through a series of culverts. Those culverts were
quickly blocked with plywood and gravel — before, officials say, oil
contaminated the lake — but they can't stay blocked forever.
Families in 22 homes in the subdivision had to evacuate to area
motels; by Monday, 10 days after the spill, Exxon said four families
could return, but the state Department of Health recommended that they
wait until air quality tests confirmed it was safe. Residents Kathryn
Chunn and Kimla Green of 38 Ledrick Circle have filed a class-action
lawsuit against Exxon to recover the loss in the value of their
property.
At this early stage of the game, real answers to what's going on in
Mayflower would be hard to come by, even if a mega-corporation wasn't on
the ground in full damage control mode, and local and county officials
hadn't largely ceded jurisdiction to them, with workers and Faulkner
County deputies barring the public and media from the scene. The
emerging picture, though — a picture that includes wildlife coated in
oil, devastated ecosystems in ExxonMobil's "restricted areas," residents
who say they are sick, and the still-ticking time bomb on the shores of
Central Arkansas's primary water source, Lake Maumelle, where the
Pegasus Pipeline comes within 600 feet of the shoreline — might be even
uglier than a neighborhood coated in crude.
Even a week after the spill, the smell of crude oil lingers near the
cove area east of I-40, a turpentine/diesel stench that makes your head
go a little swimmy if you breathe it too long. Residents we talked to
say it was much worse right after the spill happened, but it still makes
you wonder how the hive of more than 600 ExxonMobil responders who've
been working there 24/7 since the pipeline rupture, rushing around in
hardhats and hazmat suits and working at night in a swamp lit by tall,
powerful lights, can stand it, especially given that many of them we saw
weren't wearing respirators.
Howard "Duck" Sentney lives near Dam Road, which divides the cove
from Lake Conway. A former Army survival instructor who has lived on
Lake Conway for more than a decade, Sentney said the smell of oil was
almost unbearable soon after the breach.
"The first thing we smelled was like natural gas," Sentney said. "My
nose was burning, my eyes were burning, it gave me a scratchy throat.
Then all of a sudden Friday evening, the smell penetrated into the
house. ... Friday evening and Saturday evening, it was bad. Sunday
evening, we had a cookout and Sunday night it ran us off the porch."
As we spoke, a helicopter was flying slow circles over the cove. It
was probably owned by ExxonMobil or someone working for the company,
since on April 1, the Federal Aviation Administration had issued a
NOTAM, or Notice to Airmen, which placed a five-nautical-mile flight
restriction around the Mayflower site. All aircraft flying below 1,000
feet, the NOTAM said, were prohibited from entering the area unless
given permission by Tom Suhrhoff, an aviation advisor with ExxonMobil.
The ban came after KARK-TV sent a helicopter to capture aerial footage
of the spill. Many critics of the response immediately seized on the
NOTAM as an ExxonMobil effort to create a "media blackout" of the site,
but the company has denied that anything other than air safety over the
spill was the goal. The FAA ban was lifted April 5.
Sentney said his sinuses have been acting up and he's had a sore
throat since the spill. As a homeowner, he wonders how the spill will
affect the property values on homes along Dam Road. An avid fisherman,
he wonders if it will be OK to eat the fish from Lake Conway in coming
years. "It's a big question," he said. "I fish quite a bit out there and
we eat a lot of fish. So, is it going to be safe? ... Personally, I
think Exxon is not going to tell us the truth. They've got more money
than we've got."
Sentney's fears about the future quality of the lake are shared by
biologist Dr. Ben Cash, a herpetology specialist at the University of
Central Arkansas who has taken on the job of cleaning snakes that have
been rescued from the marsh that feeds the cove. (Wildlife Response
Services, hired by Exxon to clean the dozens of mallards, teal, coot,
beavers, muskrats, raccoons, turtles, nutria, grebes, squirrels and
ducks too coated to identify in a facility in Sherwood, draws the line
at snakes; it's delivered cottonmouths, water and mud snakes to Game and
Fish to take to Cash.) "We know from other events like this that there
is wildlife that moves back into the degraded habitat," picking up
contaminants and spreading them, Cash said. Also, he said, "there may
not be black crude" in Lake Conway, but the naphthalene in the crude
will leach into the cove's water, which can't be fully blocked from the
lake.
Today, the focus is on clean-up. "What will be important," Cash said, is what kind of shape the area is in "two years from now."
Ryan Senia has lived on North Starlite, a few houses away from where
the breach occurred, since 2009. He said his house was actually listed
for sale on the day of the pipeline rupture, but he's since taken down
the listing.
Senia said he was at work in Little Rock when he got a text message
about the spill from a friend and rushed to Mayflower to find his
neighborhood already blocked off. He was able to get in to his house
from 10 a.m. to noon March 30, the day after the spill. Oil had run up
his driveway and seeped into the edge of his lawn.
Like the press and public, Senia was warned away by local authorities
acting under the instructions of Exxon. "When I came out, there was a
police officer there and he said, 'If you don't have everything you need
right now, if you leave, you can't come back.' " He said he tried to go
back to his house with a journalist in tow on April 1, but was turned
away by sheriff's deputies. "It's easier to get onto a military base
than it is to get into that neighborhood right now," he said.
Senia, who claims the neighborhood's proximity to the oil pipeline
was not disclosed to him when he bought his house, said he thinks no one
will want to buy a home in the Northwoods subdivision for a very long
time. He estimated that half the neighbors he's talked to said they want
to move out.
"Even if not a single drop of oil got on my property, because my
address is on that street, I just think no one is going to buy that
house now," he said. "Even if I'm not personally scared of
contamination, a buyer might be unless there is someone to document the
cleanup process, and know that everything was removed."
Since the spill, Senia's been educating himself about pipeline
safety. He said he hopes other residents will talk to reporters who are
trying to cover the spill.
Attorney General Dustin McDaniel toured the Northwoods subdivision on April 3, and called the scene "very disturbing."
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