Cleanup of the oil spill in Mayflower is transitioning from emergency response to long-term remediation and restoration, Mayflower Unified Incident Command Center officials said in a joint news release Tuesday.
“Essentially the transition involves trying to restore the area back to its former self,” Exxon Mobil Pipeline Co. spokesman Aaron Stryk said.He noted that Exxon Mobil is not leading the cleanup efforts but is the responsible party in the spill that is estimated to have leaked about210,000 gallons of heavy crude when the company’s pipe ruptured the afternoon of March 29 in the Northwoods subdivision, causing the evacuation of 22 homes.
Restoration will involve trucking in top soil to excavated areas, seeding along ditches and controlling sedimentation, said Faulkner County Judge Allen Dodson, who has worked closely with the cleanup efforts since the spill.
Heavy equipment at cleanup sites across the town is dwindling, and the number of workers has decreased from more than 700 in the peak of the cleanup to about 440, Dodson said.
In the affected subdivision where residents of 10 of the evacuated houses were cleared to re-enter, heavy equipment remains as workers replace a storm drain where oil has soaked underneath. None of the residents had chosen to return as of Tuesday.
Removal of the storm drain began Monday and will take 10 to 14 days, weather permitting, Dodson said.
“We found some oil under that pipe,” he said. “It accumulated under the pipe, so we are going to take that up one section at a time.”
He said the storm drainage is separate from sewer pipes that carry household waste. Replacing the pipe may cause brief disruption in water flow to some residents if a waterline has to be cut off to a particular street during removal, but Dodson wasn’t sure if that would happen when reached Tuesday afternoon.
“I don’t know that we’ve decided on that yet,” he said.
The Mayflower Unified Incident Command is a group of private and public entities involved in the cleanup, including Exxon Mobil, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Faulkner County government and the city of Mayflower.
In the news release, officials said almost 100,000 working hours had been recorded in the cleanup as of Monday and that 342 boxes of debris have been collected and moved off-site for testing and disposal.
The boxes are about 6 feet by 20 feet and contain “everything from debris to the personal protective equipment that workers remove after finishing their shift,” Dodson said.
The boxes of oil-contaminated debris and gear are first held in a staging area in Mayflower for sampling and testing according to a solid-waste management plan approved by the Unified Incident Command, and then they are taken to an Exxon-owned pumping station out of town, Dodson said.
“That’s basically just to reduce the footprint here in Mayflower,” he said.
As of Monday, 162 oil-affected animals had been collected and taken to a rehabilitation center, and about 100 had been cleaned and released. As of Tuesday, 183 animals were euthanized - two turtles, one duck and the rest snakes, most of them venomous.
Meanwhile, a spokesman for the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality said in a news release Tuesday that the agency is continuing to test the air in the area and the water in nearby Lake Conway and Palarm Creek.
Air-quality tests conducted by the state agency , the EPA and a contractor of Exxon Mobil have consistently read below action levels established by the Arkansas Department of Health, both news releases said.
State environmental agency officials have taken surface-water samples about a foot and a half deep and randomly sampled between 4 and 5 feet deep in various parts of the waterways, and “the department has no evidence upon which to conclude that oil from the spill has reached the main body of Lake Conway or Palarm Creek,” that agency’s release said.
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 7 on 04/24/2013