Officials to jointly prod Exxon Mobil, pipeline watchdog

U.S. Rep. Tim Griffin, R-Ark., (left) and Pulaski County Judge Buddy Villines listen to Graham Rich, chief executive officer of Central Arkansas Water, answer questions Thursday afternoon about the Pegasus pipeline that runs through the Lake Maumelle watershed.
U.S. Rep. Tim Griffin, R-Ark., (left) and Pulaski County Judge Buddy Villines listen to Graham Rich, chief executive officer of Central Arkansas Water, answer questions Thursday afternoon about the Pegasus pipeline that runs through the Lake Maumelle watershed.

Local and congressional officials agreed Thursday to urge Exxon Mobil and a federal regulatory agency to put in place stricter precautions concerning its ruptured Pegasus pipeline and to move forward on relocating about 13.5 miles of the pipeline that travels through the Lake Maumelle watershed.

The officials met to voice concerns about the watershed, one of the largest sources of drinking water in central Arkansas, at a gathering that came more than a month after a 22-foot rupture in the 850-mile pipeline spilled 210,000 gallons of oil into a Mayflower subdivision and into a cove of Lake Conway and just two days after a second break in the pipeline south of Doniphan, Mo., leaked about 42 gallons of unrefined oil into a yard.

“I thought that it would be good to get a collective group together of federal, state and local officials to try to move this along and get honest, conscientious answers from Exxon,” Little Rock Mayor Mark Stodola said. “We need to try to decide what action we can take as a collective group to try to get some action for what we consider to be a real threat to the watershed.”

Officials from Little Rock, North Little Rock and Pulaski County and representatives from several Arkansas congressional offices agreed at the meeting to write a joint letter to Exxon Mobil and to the U.S. Transportation Department’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration to ask for a more thorough inspection of the pipeline, new shutoff precautions and better maintenance.

The letter, which officials hope to send early next week, will be some participants’ second request to move the more than 60-year-old pipeline.

Central Arkansas Water’s board of commissioners passed a resolution last month asking Exxon Mobil to report on the cause of the pipeline rupture, to give assurance that a similar situation would not happen in the Lake Maumelle watershed and to come up with a plan to move the pipeline outside of the watershed in the next five years.

The Little Rock Board of Directors and the Pulaski County Quorum Court also passed resolutions, and U.S. Rep. Tim Griffin - who was at the Thursday meeting - wrote a letter in support of moving the pipeline last month.

Central Arkansas Water delivers drinking water from Lake Maumelle to 400,000 customers and 17 communities in Pulaski, Saline and Grant counties. The pipeline travels under the Maumelle River three times inside of the watershed and comes within 600 feet of the western shore of Lake Maumelle, utility officials said.

Representatives from Exxon Mobil Corp. were invited Thursday but did not attend the meeting. Stodola said a company spokesman told him the appropriate Exxon Mobil officials were not available to meet until the week of May 13.

Officials again raised concerns Thursday about the age of the pipeline, the location and number of shutoff valves, and with a lack of response from Exxon Mobil to their questions. The pipeline runs for 15.5 miles between shutoff valves in a stretch that is largely inside the watershed.

An attorney for Central Arkansas Water, Jim McHaney, said the group had four legal options they could pursue to force the company to look more closely at possible effects on the watershed.

McHaney said someone could file a lawsuit against Exxon under the federal Pipeline Safety Act, alleging that the company has violated federal safety standards and asking for an injunction to correct those failures. He said a lawsuit could also be filed under the Arkansas Drinking Water Act, asking a state court to force the company to take corrective actions.

One of the involved entities could also ask the federal Environmental Protection Agency to exercise its emergency powers to file a lawsuit asking for an injunction to prevent the restart of the pipeline or ordering corrective action, McHaney said.

He said the groups also had an option to file a lawsuit under the National Environmental Policy Act, asking that the company be mandated to perform a thorough environmental analysis of the pipeline.

“Central Arkansas Water could file those, but there are [also] a number of people and entities that could,” McHaney said. “The Sierra Club has filed them in the past.”

Meanwhile, some corrective actions are planned for the stretch in the watershed but have not been given priority over other areas of pipeline, said Graham Rich, the chief executive officer of Central Arkansas Water. He said the company agreed two years ago to build a second check valve inside the watershed, for example, but had not done it as of Thursday.

Check valves are triggered quickly after a leak is detected to stop the back flow of oil that has passed a leaking area once the pipe loses pressure. There is only one such valve inside the watershed.

Rich said the utility has also asked that the company insulate and bury several exposed lengths of pipeline that utility staff members have found inside the watershed and to maintain and create better access to the pipeline in remote areas of the watershed.

“They prioritize their efforts, and it doesn’t seem they have the same sense of urgency as we feel in this stretch,” he said. “In their original permit, they did not even have Lake Maumelle listed as a primary drinking source.”

The pipeline has been shut down since the March oil spill, and Exxon Mobil must have written approval from the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration to restart the flow. When that permission is given, the company will be allowed to run the pipeline only at 80 percent of the pressure used when the Mayflower spill occurred.

Exxon Mobil spokesman Russ Roberts said Thursday that authorities still still have not made a preliminary determination of the cause of the spill.

Roberts said the investigation into the smaller spill in Missouri this week is still under way but “preliminary indications are that the damage was third-party related.”

A spokesman for the Missouri Department of Natural Resources had given a different reason for the spill Wednesday, saying that Exxon Mobil officials said the spill occurred from the installation more than 30 years ago of a wire used to support a power-line pole.

Roberts said Thursday that the company believes that there was another human-caused problem outside of the wire installation, but noted that he was not referring to anything intentional or criminal.

Exxon Mobil is required by the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration’s corrective action plan to have a completed failure analysis of the Mayflower spill in two weeks and a finalized work plan in two months.

Discussions have been ongoing in communities along the Arkansas part of the pipeline. The pipeline crosses through at least one other watershed and within feet of several others.

The pipeline crosses directly underneath the small area between Lake Ouachita and Lake Hamilton. Hot Springs Utilities Director Richard Penn said the pipeline is 1.5 to 2 miles downstream from the water intake for the city-owned water utility.

“It’s not a great risk for us when you consider that any spill would have to flow through the dam,” he said. “Certainly it is a risk, and that is being mitigated by the emergency-response plans through Garland County’s Office of Emergency Management. And that is an ongoing discussion and plan, but there is no move from us to ask that the company move the pipeline.”

Penn said Entergy Arkansas would have to make that request because the utility owns and manages Lake Hamilton.

Dale Kimbrow, manager of planning, regionalism and future water sources for Central Arkansas Water, said he’s talked to the larger members of the Mid-Arkansas Water Alliance, an alliance of 27 water utilities in seven central Arkansas counties, and they agreed to support the request to move the pipeline.

Kimbrow, who is also the president of the alliance’s board, said the group’s largest utilities - Bryant, Jacksonville, North Pulaski, Cabot and Salem - all buy wholesale water from Central Arkansas Water that comes from Lake Maumelle.

Central Arkansas Water owns the option to buy up to 100 million gallons per day of water from DeGray Lake, but the infrastructure to deliver that water has not been developed.

The pipeline flows close to other central and southwest Arkansas lakes, including Lake Winona, Millwood Lake and Lake Greeson.

Information for this article was contributed by Debra Hale-Shelton and Evie Blad of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 05/03/2013

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