Exxon Mobil is again in the news with yet another oil spill. This time Exxon is cleaning up an oil spill in a subdivision near Mayflower, Arkansas.
On Friday, it was discovered that a leak had occured in Exxon’s Pegagus Pipeline near that community. The Pegasus Pipeline can carry as much as 90,000 gallons of crude per day.
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Exxon brought in response equipment to handle 10,000 barrels of oil and fifteen vacuum trucks and 33 storage tanks are in place for the clean up. As of Sunday, 12,000 barrels of oil have been retrieved from the area around the breached pipeline. This is up from the 4,500 barrels that was retrieved by Saturday.
Exxon has no estimate of how much oil has spilled in Arkansas. The free-standing oil in the streets has been picked up, but sticky residue remains.
22 homes were evacuated as a result of the spill and about 50 claims against Exxon have been filed thus far. Oil has saturated some yards and some homes have crude oil on their foundations. Homeowners were escorted by Mayflower police to retrieve personal belongings from their homes.
First responders, made up of firemen, city employees, county road crews, and police worked quickly to build dikes of earth, dirt and rock to block culverts leading to a local lake stocked with Bass, Catfish, Bream and Crapple as crude oil poured into the storm drains from the street. The storm drains lead to the lake.
The Pegasus Pipeline originally moved oil from Texas to Illinois. But, in 2006, in response to the growing production of Canadian crude, Exxon reversed the flow of the pipeline to bring crude to refineries along the Gulf Coast.
In a court appeal last year, Exxon won out and a decision was made to allow Exxon to charge uncapped market rates on oil flowing through the line. Those prices can now change without prior approval of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. And so, Exxon has upped the amount of crude running through the pipeline to about 66,000 barrels a day.
The Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, who was on hand with officials from EPA to oversee the cleanup, last week proposed that Exxon pay a $1.7 million fine for pipeline safety violations for the Silvertip Pipeline running through the Yellowstone River. That pipeline dumped 1,500 barrels of oil into the river after heavy flooding in the area in July of 2011. Exxon has 30 days from the March 25th filing to contest the violations.
This newest spill comes as supporters of the Keystone Pipeline responded to the train derailment last Wednesday that dumped 30,000 gallons of Canadian crude when a mile-long train derailed in western Minnesota. 14 cars from a total of 94 cars left the tracks in that accident. Pipelins supporters pointed out that pipelines were more secure from incidents than train-transported crude.