Sixty-four Mayflower residents are suing the Exxon Mobil Pipeline Co., Exxon Mobil Corp., and the planners and developers involved in building the Mayflower subdivision where a 22-foot rupture in the Pegasus Pipeline spilled almost 150,000 gallons of oil into a residential neighborhood and a cove of Lake Conway on March 29.
The 32-page civil lawsuit was filed late Tuesday in Faulkner County Circuit Court.
The lawsuit claims that more than 10,000 barrels of oil were spilled into the neighborhood, causing health issues, a decline in property values and other loss of property and health. Exxon Mobil officials gave a revised estimate last week for the amount spilled - about 3,500 barrels of oil. Its previous estimate was 5,000 barrels, or 210,000 gallons.
A spokesman for Exxon Mobil said late Wednesday that company officials had not seen the lawsuit and would not comment at this time.
Phone calls to the home and off ice numbers late Wednesday for the plaintiffs’ attorney, Shawn Bradley Daniels of Fayetteville, were not immediately returned. Calls to several of the home phone numbers for the plaintiffs were not answered or rang to messages saying the numbers had been temporarily disconnected.
The lawsuit also lists as defendants David Raulston, the Conway-based maintenance operations technician for the pipeline; Harold Satterfield, a Faulkner County planner and developer for the Northwoods subdivision; Robert French, the land surveyor who surveyed the Northwoods subdivision; the Center for Toxicology and Environmental Health LLC; and six different classes of John Does who may have inspected, regulated or maintained the pipeline and may be added to the lawsuit at a later date.
The lawsuit alleges that the pipeline was not fit to carry Wabasca heavy crude once the flow of the pipeline was reversed to flow from Canada to Texas in 2006. Before the reversal, the pipeline took Texas crude oil and transported it north.
“The reversal in pipeline flow, the increase in capacity, and the pumping of abrasive tar sands crude oil through the pipeline increased the hydraulic and stress demands on the pipeline causing it to weaken,” the lawsuit says. “These actions created a further unsafe and unreasonably dangerous condition from which a major pipeline rupture and disaster was inevitable.”
The lawsuit also alleges that Exxon Mobil has a history of “failing to timely and appropriately inspect and maintain” the pipeline, and that the company knowingly concealed the defects that led to the spill.
The plaintiffs claim that the developers were negligent because they knew that the pipeline was below the land on which they chose to build the Northwoods subdivision, and they failed to disclose that the pipeline ran underneath the neighborhood when selling the properties.
The lawsuit also includes three nuisance complaints, two complaints of trespassing and two complaints of violations under the Arkansas Deceptive Trade Practices Act.
The complaint lists physical symptoms suffered by each of the defendants, including nasal congestion, bloody noses, nausea and throwing up, burning eyes and headaches, among others. It also lists matters involving the health of pets.
One resident said in the suit that the evacuation forced him and his wife to leave their home without the medication she was taking after having a stroke two weeks before the spill.
Another resident said in the suit that Exxon had him wrongfully arrested for walking near the railroad tracks where the oil had flowed into a ditch before reaching a cove of Lake Conway. A third resident said the smell of chemicals has caused her to lose her sense of taste.
A Wednesday e-mail from the Mayflower Unified Command updated the cleanup efforts. It said crews are ready to move from emergency cleanup mode to remediation, and that all visible free-standing oil has been removed from the environment.
The news release also said the indoor and outdoor air samples for several evacuated Northwoods homes had been deemed to be below hazardous levels established by the Arkansas Department of Health. Health officials will meet with homeowners to explain individual results, the news release said, adding that daily outdoor air quality sampling will now cease.
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 7 on 05/30/2013