Exxon slow on spill plan; watershed gets little note

Exxon Mobil formulated a detailed emergency plan for responding to a crudeoil pipeline rupture in the Lake Maumelle watershed only after a complaint from Central Arkansas Water, and then didn’t give a copy of the document to the utility until May, more than a year after completing it.

“ExxonMobil’s failure to develop a timely, detailed emergency response plan in case of a spill near Lake Maumelle boggles the mind - especially considering they should have given the development of a plan top priority years ago,” said U.S.Rep. Tim Griffin, whose 2nd District includes Mayflower and Lake Maumelle. “And their Lake Maumelle emergency response plan filed with PHMSA is wholly inadequate: it barely mentions Lake Maumelle.”

PHMSA is the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, a federal regulatory agency.

“The more detailed tactical response plan ExxonMobil developed and provided to Central Arkansas Water is a start, but true preparedness requires detailed, military-like planning and training to protect Lake Maumelle and the drinking water for over 400,000 Arkansans,”Griffin, R-Ark., said in a statement Friday.

“ExxonMobil’s tardiness is inexcusable, and they must address their shortcomings immediately,” he added.

A separate emergency plan approved in July by the federal government for the Pegasus pipeline focuses little on the lake and apparently doesn’t even mention that it is the drinking-water source for so many Arkansans, said John Tynan, the utility’s watershed protection manager.

The federal pipeline administration didn’t release Exxon Mobil Pipeline Co.’s 290-page emergency-response plan for public re-view until after the agency approved it. Even then, the plan posted on the agency’s website was heavily redacted.

Exxon Mobil filed that plan with the administration in February and used it to respond to a March 29 pipeline rupture in Mayflower, where an estimated 210,000 gallons of heavy crude gushed into the Northwoods subdivision, a ditch, a creek and a cove of Lake Conway. The cleanup there continues.

FOCUS ON LITTLE RED RIVER

Exxon Mobil’s plan filed with the federal government focuses far more on the Little Red River in White County than on Lake Maumelle.

That river provides drinking water to Searcy and some other parts of White County, which had a population of 78,167 as of 2011.

The reason for the focus on the Little Red River is that federal regulations require Exxon Mobil to consider the worst-case scenario in a pipeline section if a spill occurs there - and, in this case, that is in White County, company spokesman David Eglinton said Friday. The worst case is based not on location, but on the amount of oil that could be released in a section of the pipeline.

Eglinton explained in an email: “Federal regulation establishes how the hypothetical Worst Case Discharge in each response zone should be determined and, for the Pegasus Pipeline in the Corsicana (Texas) Zone, requires that the determination utilize the section of the line with the highest potential release volume based on the volume of oil contained between isolation valves.

“Consistent with this regulation, the Worst Case Discharge calculation for the Corsicana Response Zone was based upon a hypothetical complete failure of a pipeline segment between the Strawberry, Arkansas pump station and the Conway, Arkansas pump station (in the area of the Little Red River) assuming loss of the entire contents of the line,” he added.

Eglinton said the plan’s appendix “states that Lake Maumelle is a Highly Sensitive Area.”

It was unclear why Exxon Mobil also couldn’t have provided more information on Lake Maumelle in that plan. Eglinton said he could not get an answer on that matter.

Tynan, who has seen an unredacted version of the plan, said he could not find any references to Lake Maumelle in it other than maps and a chart listing mile markers and waterways that the Pegasus pipeline crosses, specifically the Maumelle River and three creeks.

“For each of those areas, it identifies various control points where they would be established if a rupture were to occur,” he said.

Exxon Mobil developed the separate, nonrequired tactical-response plan in collaboration with Central Arkansas Water after a utility executive wrote the federal agency in July 2010 and noted that the federal response plan in effect then didn’t deal adequately with Lake Maumelle.

That letter in part expressed “concerns that it [the document] fails to mention anywhere in the document that Lake Maumelle is a Public Water Supply Surface Reservoir” and didn’t mention any Little Rock hospitals.

Griffin said in an email that on May 22, Exxon Mobil officials - including Karen Tyrone, the pipeline company’s vice president for operations - met with congressional staff members and utility officials in Little Rock to update them on the Mayflower spill’s investigation and toaddress the utility’s concerns. TACTICAL PLAN SLOW TO COME

Until then, Tynan said, Exxon Mobil had been reluctant to give the utility a copy of the tactical-response plan aimed at Lake Maumelle, apparently because of security concerns, even though Tynan said it was finalized in August 2011. Eglinton said it was completed in late 2011 or early 2012.

“However, CAW recognizes and deals with security threats, and that was something we were easily able to accommodate their concerns in that respect,” Tynan said.

Asked why it took Exxon Mobil so long to come up with a plan dealing with Lake Maumelle, Eglinton said, “Tactical spills are not required by regulation. The one for Lake Maumelle came out of our discussions with the CAW on how best to protect the lake. The idea for the plan was proposed by Exxon-Mobil, and we reviewed the plan with the CAW before it was completed.”

At the May 22 meeting, Exxon Mobil finally “shared with CAW the most recent copy of [the] Emergency Response Plans” and the separate tactical response plan for the lake and its watershed, Griffin said.

“The latter was a collaborative effort by CAW and Exxon Mobil over the past two years to address emergency response concerns over the Maumelle watershed and it includes more than 250 pages of detailed scenarios and tactics for how to respond to an incident,” the congressman said.

“Certainly we’re glad to have a copy of it,” Tynan said. “The next step … is to utilize it for training and preparation purposes.

“I think the reality of the situation is that if something were to occur, we want to be as prepared as we can be as opposed to having CAW and local emergency responders having to flip through” such a big document to find out what to do then.

“Providing the document and providing our access to it is a good first step,” Tynan said. “Now, we need to utilize it in emergency preparedness exercises.”

Eglinton said company representatives “drilled at Lake Maumelle with the CAW within the last three years and are open to continue to do so in the future.”

Tynan said the last record he has of such a drill was in 2010. “We did a tabletop [in-office] exercise with them in 2009, and a field exercise in 2010,” and those were before the tactical-response plan was completed, he said.

“We could and should be doing these more regularly, especially in light of the Mayflower” spill, Tynan said.

The Mayflower spill took place on the afternoon of Good Friday. The pipeline ruptured between two houses in the Northwoods subdivision, forcing the long-term evacuation of residents of 22 homes, most of whom have not moved back.

The pipeline, which has been shut down since the spill, carried diluted bitumen, a thick Canadian crude oil that is mixed with various ingredients - including the carcinogen benzene - to help the oil flow through the pipeline.

Central Arkansas Water has tried for several years to negotiate relocating the pipeline, which was built in 1947-48. Lake Maumelle was completed in late 1958.

The pipeline runs from Illinois to the Texas Gulf Coast. A laboratory that investigated the Mayflower rupture has blamed the rupture in part on manufacturing defects.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 08/18/2013

Upcoming Events