Four people who own property along Lake Conway have sued Exxon Mobil and two of its subsidiaries over a Good Friday oil spill that contaminated a Mayflower subdivision and a cove of the popular fishing lake.
The lawsuit, which seeks class-action status on behalf of other lakefront property owners, was filed Thursday in U.S. District Court against Exxon Mobil Corp., Exxon Mobil Pipeline Co. and Mobil Pipe Line Co. The plaintiffs are Ellen Burgess, Kathy Ouellette, Howard Senteney and Margaret Roberts.
Exxon Mobil’s Pegasuspipeline, built in 1947 and 1948, ruptured March 29, sending thousands of gallons of heavy crude oil into the Northwoods subdivision, a creek and a cove of the 6,700-acre lake.
Exxon Mobil has declined comment on preliminary findings about what caused the rupture. Those findings, reported to the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration this month, are to be updated in a final report in July.
Exxon Mobil offered a compensation plan for Northwoods residents and, among other things, offered to buy at pre-spill appraisalprices the 22 homes that have been evacuated since the accident. The corporation did not, however, include lakeside property owners in that plan.
Rather, Exxon Mobil spokesman Aaron Stryk said, “For residents outside of the subdivision, ExxonMobil will continue to honor all valid claims. Non-Northwoods homeowners’ claims will be handled on a case-by-case basis.”
Exxon Mobil had not bought any homes as of Friday, Stryk said.
About 6:30 p.m. Friday, Exxon Mobil issued a news release through a contracted media-relations company described as being from the “unified command,” which consists of government agencies and Exxon Mobil. The release said “some” residents had begun returning home.
“We understand that residents for one or two homes have returned and others are in various stages of moving back,” Stryk said in an e-mail later.
Earlier Friday, Stryk said Exxon Mobil was aware of the latest lawsuit, one of several, but had no comment on it. “As a general practice, we typically don’t provide comment regarding on-going litigation,” he said.
The lawsuit says that the spill released poisonous and carcinogenic chemicals into the air and the water, and that the pipeline was not shut down for more than 98 minutes, rather than the 16 minutes that Exxon Mobil has said the process took. The quality of the lake and shoreline property was damaged, and property values have declined, the lawsuit says.
In 2002, Exxon Mobil shut down the Pegasus pipeline and reopened it in 2006 after reversing the oil’s flow from Illinois to the Gulf Coast of Texas. In 2009, the lawsuit alleges, Exxon Mobil increased the flow of oil from 66,000 barrels to 99,000 barrels per day.
The lawsuit contends that both actions increased the dangers of a rupture and that Exxon Mobil was aware of those risks before March 29.
“ExxonMobil, in order to increase its profits at the expense of public safety, made a deliberate corporate decision to increase the capacity of the unsafe and deficient Pegasus Pipeline by [50 percent] … of Canadian TarSands [oil],” the lawsuit says.
The Pegasus pipeline, which has not operated since the Mayflower spill, moves Wabasca heavy crude pumped from beneath northern Alberta, Canada. Oil produced from the Athabasca Oil Sands is often called tar sands oil. The kind in the Mayflower spill is from a similar sandstone formation and is “effectively the same” type of oil, Russellville-based energy analyst James Williams has said.
The lawsuit further contends the Pegasus pipeline - which it said originally pumped light, sweet crude - “was not designed to transfer toxic and corrosive substances such as Tar Sands.”
“The Defendants knew the transportation of Canadian Tar Sands imposed greater risks to oil pipeline integrity, including greater corrosive effects on oil pipelines, which are already defective and unsafe, and pose serious safety risks and danger to people and property in close proximity to the Pegasus Pipeline,” the lawsuit says.
The plaintiffs also say Exxon Mobil has misled the public by giving out wrong information and by suppressing the truth.
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 9 on 06/29/2013