Why Tar Sands Pipelines Guarantee Disaster
Posted: Fri Apr 12, 2013 11:28 amWhy Tar Sands Pipelines Guarantee Disaster
WATCH: Arkansas Oil Spill Video: Raw Aerial Footage Shows Extent Of Exxon's Pegasus Pipeline Spill
(*** Slide show at end of article . . .)
< http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/1 ... 63278.html >
The Huffington Post | By Nick Visser
Posted: 04/11/2013 3:57 pm EDT
Follow:
Video, Arkansas Oil Spill, Arkansas Oil, Arkansas, Arkensas Oil Spill, Exxon Arkansas Oil Spill, Exxon Oil Spill, Exxon Oil Spill Arkansas, Oil Spill, Oil Spill Arkansas, Oil Spill In Arkansas, Green News
- - - -
Stunning aerial footage has emerged of ExxonMobil's Pegasus pipeline oil spill in Mayflower, Arkansas.
A five-minute long video was posted to YouTube on April 2, three days after a flood of diluted bitumen surged from a broken tar sands pipeline. The video was taken by videojournalist Adam Randall sometime before the Federal Aviation Administration placed a No-Fly Zone over the neighborhood.
The extent of the spill is still unknown, but officials are saying thousands of barrels gushed from a 2-inch-wide, 22-foot-long gash. More than 22,000 barrels of oily water and 2,000 cubic yards of oiled debris have already been recovered.
"The pipeline rupture is substantially larger than many of us initially thought," Dustin McDaniel, Arkansas Attorney General, told reporters on Wednesday after he subpoenaed more than 12,500 pages of documents from Exxon related to the spill.
Reports have emerged that journalists have been barred from the site and threatened with arrest. A video posted to YouTube was also slammed by Rachel Maddow after activists with Tar Sands Blockade filmed what appear to be paper towels being used to clean up the spill.
Residents in the area have also started to file health complaints, reported HuffPost's Lynne Peeples.
In an odd turn of events, ExxonMobil was presented with a safety medal by the National Safety Council days after the spill.
MORE:
< http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/1 ... 63278.html >
= = = =
Why Tar Sands Pipelines Guarantee Disaster
< http://www.alternet.org/environment/why ... e-disaster >
April 10, 2013 | AlterNet [1] / By Michael Brune [2]
This article was published in partnership with GlobalPossibilities.org [3].
- - - -
QUOTES:
"No wonder ExxonMobil is doing everything it can [6] to keep reporters and everyone else as far away from the Mayflower disaster as possible. The more the American public learns about the real cost of tar sands crude, the more opposition to the Keystone XL and other tar sands projects will increase."
"Here's something we do know: The first Keystone XL disaster will be far worse than what happened in Mayflower, since TransCanada's pipeline will pump ten times as much tar sands crude as the Pegasus does."
- - - -
It's now been almost two weeks since ExxonMobil's Pegasus pipeline spill put at least 500,000 gallons of tar sands crude and contaminated water into the Arkansas community of Mayflower. Many of the evacuated families still haven't been able to return to their homes.
Sierra Club organizer Glen Hooks, who grew up about 20 miles southeast of Mayflower, in Gravel Ridge, attended a meeting for the displaced families at Mayflower High School: "I had to really stare down some ExxonMobil goons who told me to leave because it was a private meeting. I politely explained that it was a meeting in a public building about a public subject with numerous public officials in attendance, and that I was planning to stay."
Glen's soft-spoken, but he's not easily intimidated. Arkansas Business Journal named him an "Eco-Hero of the Year" for his work in helping to stop new coal-fired power plants. During the Mayflower meeting, Glen listened as an ExxonMobil executive apologized to the families and said that the focus was on safety and helping the homeowners. "The meeting then moved into a phase where ExxonMobil met with individual family members about their claims in a side room guarded by no fewer than six uniformed police officers."
Here's something that ExxonMobil probably didn't tell those homeowners: In 2010, it was fined $26,200 [4] by the U.S. Department of Transportation's Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration for failing to regularly inspect each point where the Pegasus line crosses under a navigable waterway.
This is a pipeline that crosses under the Mississippi River (just one of the places ExxonMobil failed to do inspections). It's hard to say which is more shocking: That "safety first" ExxonMobil has been so cavalier about pipeline inspections or that it was fined such a pittance for its irresponsibility. By my calculation, $26,200 comes out to about .00009% of ExxonMobil's net income for 2010. Let's put that in perspective. If ExxonMobil's income were the same as the median family income in Faulkner County, Arkansas, which is where its pipeline leaked, then ExxonMobil's fine for putting the Mississippi River at risk would have been not quite four cents.
No matter how much ExxonMobil ends up spending to clean up the mess in Mayflower, the impact on its profit statement will be miniscule. Unfortunately, no amount of cash can buy peace of mind for the families whose homes were violated by tar sands. Tar sands crude is both more toxic and much harder to clean than ordinary crude. Just ask Enbridge, which has now spent almost $1 billion and two years trying to clean up the Kalamazoo River after the largest onshore oil spill in U.S. history. Enbridge has experience, too. There were 804 spills on its pipelines between 1999 and 2010. [5]
- - - - SNIP - - - -
We have a few days left. Tell the president to keep his climate promises [7]:
< http://action.sierraclub.org/site/R?i=N ... Qtx0Bl77qQ >
Links to see more stories tagged with:
< http://www.alternet.org/environment/why ... e-disaster >
tar sands [8],
keystone xl [9],
kxl [10],
pipeline [11]
Source URL Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org
[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/michael-brune
[3] http://globalpossibilities.org/
[4] http://action.sierraclub.org/site/R?i=F ... 2xdUEAxrHw
[5] http://action.sierraclub.org/site/R?i=e ... lO_3IwwWkg
[6] http://action.sierraclub.org/site/R?i=v ... A4at39tpdw
[7] http://action.sierraclub.org/site/R?i=N ... Qtx0Bl77qQ
[8] http://www.alternet.org/tags/tar-sands
[9] http://www.alternet.org/tags/keystone-xl-0
[10] http://www.alternet.org/tags/kxl
[11] http://www.alternet.org/tags/pipeline
[12] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
= = = =
Insight: Mayflower, meet Exxon: When oil spilled in an Arkansas town
http://planetark.org/wen/68387
Date: 12-Apr-13 Country: USA Author: Edward McAllister
Warren Andrews had just finished putting up balloons for his stepdaughter's 18th birthday party at their suburban home in Mayflower, Arkansas, when his wife came inside and said something was wrong.
After stepping out of his house, and taking one glance, he immediately dialed 911.
"I don't know what's going on, but I've got a river of oil coming down the street at me," Andrews told the operator.
Five minutes later, the slick of noxious black crude spewing from a ruptured Exxon Mobil pipeline was eight feet wide, six inches deep and growing fast.
Within half an hour, a representative from Exxon Mobil Corp was on the scene. By the next day, Exxon's agents had contacted the evacuated residents and were writing checks for their living expenses.
Three days after the spill on the afternoon of March 29, 120 workers had descended on the town, a number that would eventually swell to more than 600 from across the country, including company doctors, communication specialists and wildlife experts.
Now, nearly two weeks after the 5,000-barrel spill occurred on Good Friday, a picture has emerged of a giant oil company thrust into a small blue-collar community, intricately managing not just the cleanup of a major spill, but also using its large check book to try to win over the townsfolk and seek to limit the fallout.
At stake is not just the reputation of the world's largest publicly traded oil company, but the spill's impact on a fractious national debate about the effect of shipping increasing amounts of tarry Canadian crude across the United States.
"We are trying to make sure that people are not financially impacted by this," said Exxon spokesman Alan Jeffers. "We will honor all valid claims."
The incident in Mayflower, 25 miles north of Little Rock, pales in comparison to the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989, when hundreds of thousands of barrels of crude spilled from an Exxon oil tanker into Alaskan waters. It's too early to estimate the financial cost from Mayflower to Exxon, but it is likely to be a drop in the bucket for the $400 billion company.
But the spill has stoked a national debate about the safety of carrying crude in pipelines across the United States just as politicians weigh whether to approve the mega Keystone XL pipeline that will help to link the oil sands of Alberta, Canada, with oil refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast.
And although significant pipeline spills happen every three days on average in the United States, according to federal data, rarely do they occur in a town and rarely in these volumes.
MORE:
http://planetark.org/wen/68387
= = = = =
Class-action lawsuit filed against ExxonMobil for Pegasus oil spill
< http://www.icis.com/Articles/2013/04/08 ... s-oil.html >
08 April 2013 16:07 [Source: ICIS news]
By: Tracy Dang +1 713 525 2653
- - - -
QUOTE: "ExxonMobil must obtain written approval from the director of PHMSA’s southwest region before the Pegasus pipeline can return to service."
- - -
HOUSTON (ICIS)--ExxonMobil on Monday declined to comment on a class-action lawsuit filed last week against the US energy giant after the 29 March Pegasus pipeline rupture and oil spill that forced the evacuation of 22 homes in Mayflower, Arkansas.
“We do not comment on legal matters,” said company spokesperson Kim Jordan.
Kathryn Chunn and Kimla Greene on Friday filed the complaint to US District Court in the Eastern District of Arkansas on behalf of themselves and others similarly affected.
The lawsuit is seeking more than $5m (€3.85m) in damages.
“This Arkansas class-action lawsuit involves the worst crude oil and tar sands spill in Arkansas history and directly impacts all individuals who reside by the ExxonMobil Pegasus Pipeline,” the court document said.
“Plaintiffs bring this lawsuit to recover for a permanent diminishment in property value for being located near the unsafe and defective pipeline on behalf of all property owners similarly situated throughout the state of Arkansas who are in close proximity to the Pegasus Pipeline,” it added.
In its latest update on Saturday, ExxonMobil estimated that 5,000 bbl of oil was spilled in the incident, adding that a final estimate will be released once the line has been repaired and refilled.
The company said that much of the free-standing oil has been recovered, and most of the impacted soil has been removed from the six homes impacted by the spill.
The main body of Lake Conway remains oil free, and there has been no impact on the drinking water supply, ExxonMobil added.
On Friday, the Arkansas attorney general’s office gave ExxonMobil a deadline of 10 April to produce investigative reports, inspection documents and other information connected to the incident.
ExxonMobil also was issued an order from the US Department of Transportation (DOT) that requires the company to take “necessary corrective action to protect public, property and the environment from potential hazards” associated with the incident, said the DOT’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA).
MORE:
< http://www.icis.com/Articles/2013/04/08 ... s-oil.html >
WATCH: Arkansas Oil Spill Video: Raw Aerial Footage Shows Extent Of Exxon's Pegasus Pipeline Spill
(*** Slide show at end of article . . .)
< http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/1 ... 63278.html >
The Huffington Post | By Nick Visser
Posted: 04/11/2013 3:57 pm EDT
Follow:
Video, Arkansas Oil Spill, Arkansas Oil, Arkansas, Arkensas Oil Spill, Exxon Arkansas Oil Spill, Exxon Oil Spill, Exxon Oil Spill Arkansas, Oil Spill, Oil Spill Arkansas, Oil Spill In Arkansas, Green News
- - - -
Stunning aerial footage has emerged of ExxonMobil's Pegasus pipeline oil spill in Mayflower, Arkansas.
A five-minute long video was posted to YouTube on April 2, three days after a flood of diluted bitumen surged from a broken tar sands pipeline. The video was taken by videojournalist Adam Randall sometime before the Federal Aviation Administration placed a No-Fly Zone over the neighborhood.
The extent of the spill is still unknown, but officials are saying thousands of barrels gushed from a 2-inch-wide, 22-foot-long gash. More than 22,000 barrels of oily water and 2,000 cubic yards of oiled debris have already been recovered.
"The pipeline rupture is substantially larger than many of us initially thought," Dustin McDaniel, Arkansas Attorney General, told reporters on Wednesday after he subpoenaed more than 12,500 pages of documents from Exxon related to the spill.
Reports have emerged that journalists have been barred from the site and threatened with arrest. A video posted to YouTube was also slammed by Rachel Maddow after activists with Tar Sands Blockade filmed what appear to be paper towels being used to clean up the spill.
Residents in the area have also started to file health complaints, reported HuffPost's Lynne Peeples.
In an odd turn of events, ExxonMobil was presented with a safety medal by the National Safety Council days after the spill.
MORE:
< http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/1 ... 63278.html >
= = = =
Why Tar Sands Pipelines Guarantee Disaster
< http://www.alternet.org/environment/why ... e-disaster >
April 10, 2013 | AlterNet [1] / By Michael Brune [2]
This article was published in partnership with GlobalPossibilities.org [3].
- - - -
QUOTES:
"No wonder ExxonMobil is doing everything it can [6] to keep reporters and everyone else as far away from the Mayflower disaster as possible. The more the American public learns about the real cost of tar sands crude, the more opposition to the Keystone XL and other tar sands projects will increase."
"Here's something we do know: The first Keystone XL disaster will be far worse than what happened in Mayflower, since TransCanada's pipeline will pump ten times as much tar sands crude as the Pegasus does."
- - - -
It's now been almost two weeks since ExxonMobil's Pegasus pipeline spill put at least 500,000 gallons of tar sands crude and contaminated water into the Arkansas community of Mayflower. Many of the evacuated families still haven't been able to return to their homes.
Sierra Club organizer Glen Hooks, who grew up about 20 miles southeast of Mayflower, in Gravel Ridge, attended a meeting for the displaced families at Mayflower High School: "I had to really stare down some ExxonMobil goons who told me to leave because it was a private meeting. I politely explained that it was a meeting in a public building about a public subject with numerous public officials in attendance, and that I was planning to stay."
Glen's soft-spoken, but he's not easily intimidated. Arkansas Business Journal named him an "Eco-Hero of the Year" for his work in helping to stop new coal-fired power plants. During the Mayflower meeting, Glen listened as an ExxonMobil executive apologized to the families and said that the focus was on safety and helping the homeowners. "The meeting then moved into a phase where ExxonMobil met with individual family members about their claims in a side room guarded by no fewer than six uniformed police officers."
Here's something that ExxonMobil probably didn't tell those homeowners: In 2010, it was fined $26,200 [4] by the U.S. Department of Transportation's Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration for failing to regularly inspect each point where the Pegasus line crosses under a navigable waterway.
This is a pipeline that crosses under the Mississippi River (just one of the places ExxonMobil failed to do inspections). It's hard to say which is more shocking: That "safety first" ExxonMobil has been so cavalier about pipeline inspections or that it was fined such a pittance for its irresponsibility. By my calculation, $26,200 comes out to about .00009% of ExxonMobil's net income for 2010. Let's put that in perspective. If ExxonMobil's income were the same as the median family income in Faulkner County, Arkansas, which is where its pipeline leaked, then ExxonMobil's fine for putting the Mississippi River at risk would have been not quite four cents.
No matter how much ExxonMobil ends up spending to clean up the mess in Mayflower, the impact on its profit statement will be miniscule. Unfortunately, no amount of cash can buy peace of mind for the families whose homes were violated by tar sands. Tar sands crude is both more toxic and much harder to clean than ordinary crude. Just ask Enbridge, which has now spent almost $1 billion and two years trying to clean up the Kalamazoo River after the largest onshore oil spill in U.S. history. Enbridge has experience, too. There were 804 spills on its pipelines between 1999 and 2010. [5]
- - - - SNIP - - - -
We have a few days left. Tell the president to keep his climate promises [7]:
< http://action.sierraclub.org/site/R?i=N ... Qtx0Bl77qQ >
Links to see more stories tagged with:
< http://www.alternet.org/environment/why ... e-disaster >
tar sands [8],
keystone xl [9],
kxl [10],
pipeline [11]
Source URL Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org
[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/michael-brune
[3] http://globalpossibilities.org/
[4] http://action.sierraclub.org/site/R?i=F ... 2xdUEAxrHw
[5] http://action.sierraclub.org/site/R?i=e ... lO_3IwwWkg
[6] http://action.sierraclub.org/site/R?i=v ... A4at39tpdw
[7] http://action.sierraclub.org/site/R?i=N ... Qtx0Bl77qQ
[8] http://www.alternet.org/tags/tar-sands
[9] http://www.alternet.org/tags/keystone-xl-0
[10] http://www.alternet.org/tags/kxl
[11] http://www.alternet.org/tags/pipeline
[12] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
= = = =
Insight: Mayflower, meet Exxon: When oil spilled in an Arkansas town
http://planetark.org/wen/68387
Date: 12-Apr-13 Country: USA Author: Edward McAllister
Warren Andrews had just finished putting up balloons for his stepdaughter's 18th birthday party at their suburban home in Mayflower, Arkansas, when his wife came inside and said something was wrong.
After stepping out of his house, and taking one glance, he immediately dialed 911.
"I don't know what's going on, but I've got a river of oil coming down the street at me," Andrews told the operator.
Five minutes later, the slick of noxious black crude spewing from a ruptured Exxon Mobil pipeline was eight feet wide, six inches deep and growing fast.
Within half an hour, a representative from Exxon Mobil Corp was on the scene. By the next day, Exxon's agents had contacted the evacuated residents and were writing checks for their living expenses.
Three days after the spill on the afternoon of March 29, 120 workers had descended on the town, a number that would eventually swell to more than 600 from across the country, including company doctors, communication specialists and wildlife experts.
Now, nearly two weeks after the 5,000-barrel spill occurred on Good Friday, a picture has emerged of a giant oil company thrust into a small blue-collar community, intricately managing not just the cleanup of a major spill, but also using its large check book to try to win over the townsfolk and seek to limit the fallout.
At stake is not just the reputation of the world's largest publicly traded oil company, but the spill's impact on a fractious national debate about the effect of shipping increasing amounts of tarry Canadian crude across the United States.
"We are trying to make sure that people are not financially impacted by this," said Exxon spokesman Alan Jeffers. "We will honor all valid claims."
The incident in Mayflower, 25 miles north of Little Rock, pales in comparison to the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989, when hundreds of thousands of barrels of crude spilled from an Exxon oil tanker into Alaskan waters. It's too early to estimate the financial cost from Mayflower to Exxon, but it is likely to be a drop in the bucket for the $400 billion company.
But the spill has stoked a national debate about the safety of carrying crude in pipelines across the United States just as politicians weigh whether to approve the mega Keystone XL pipeline that will help to link the oil sands of Alberta, Canada, with oil refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast.
And although significant pipeline spills happen every three days on average in the United States, according to federal data, rarely do they occur in a town and rarely in these volumes.
MORE:
http://planetark.org/wen/68387
= = = = =
Class-action lawsuit filed against ExxonMobil for Pegasus oil spill
< http://www.icis.com/Articles/2013/04/08 ... s-oil.html >
08 April 2013 16:07 [Source: ICIS news]
By: Tracy Dang +1 713 525 2653
- - - -
QUOTE: "ExxonMobil must obtain written approval from the director of PHMSA’s southwest region before the Pegasus pipeline can return to service."
- - -
HOUSTON (ICIS)--ExxonMobil on Monday declined to comment on a class-action lawsuit filed last week against the US energy giant after the 29 March Pegasus pipeline rupture and oil spill that forced the evacuation of 22 homes in Mayflower, Arkansas.
“We do not comment on legal matters,” said company spokesperson Kim Jordan.
Kathryn Chunn and Kimla Greene on Friday filed the complaint to US District Court in the Eastern District of Arkansas on behalf of themselves and others similarly affected.
The lawsuit is seeking more than $5m (€3.85m) in damages.
“This Arkansas class-action lawsuit involves the worst crude oil and tar sands spill in Arkansas history and directly impacts all individuals who reside by the ExxonMobil Pegasus Pipeline,” the court document said.
“Plaintiffs bring this lawsuit to recover for a permanent diminishment in property value for being located near the unsafe and defective pipeline on behalf of all property owners similarly situated throughout the state of Arkansas who are in close proximity to the Pegasus Pipeline,” it added.
In its latest update on Saturday, ExxonMobil estimated that 5,000 bbl of oil was spilled in the incident, adding that a final estimate will be released once the line has been repaired and refilled.
The company said that much of the free-standing oil has been recovered, and most of the impacted soil has been removed from the six homes impacted by the spill.
The main body of Lake Conway remains oil free, and there has been no impact on the drinking water supply, ExxonMobil added.
On Friday, the Arkansas attorney general’s office gave ExxonMobil a deadline of 10 April to produce investigative reports, inspection documents and other information connected to the incident.
ExxonMobil also was issued an order from the US Department of Transportation (DOT) that requires the company to take “necessary corrective action to protect public, property and the environment from potential hazards” associated with the incident, said the DOT’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA).
MORE:
< http://www.icis.com/Articles/2013/04/08 ... s-oil.html >