A congressman expressed growing frustration Wednesday with the “ridiculous” secrecy that he believes Exxon Mobil is trying to exert over documents relating to the safety of the Pegasus pipeline.
Rep. Tim Griffin, R-Ark., said he had “some concerns” about a confidentiality agreement that Exxon Mobil Pipeline Co. last week reached with Central Arkansas Water, the public utility overseeing Lake Maumelle, which provides drinking water to more than 400,000 central Arkansans. The utility has been seeking such documents since shortly after the pipeline ruptured in Mayflower on March 29.
Because the utility is a public agency, any documents shared with it become subject to the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act. Documents that would pose a security risk or that might create a competitive advantage for another party are exempted under state law.
Griffin, whose 2nd District includes Mayflower and Lake Maumelle, stressed that his concerns were with Exxon Mobil, not the utility.
“They [Exxon Mobil officials] don’t do themselves or anyone else any favors with how they communicate with the press and the public,” he said. “It’s embarrassing for one of the world’s largest corporations to function in this manner.”
“What concerns me is, they cut some kind of nondisclosure deal,” Griffin said.“What I’m going to do is get my hands on whatever information I can. And if I feel like it needs to be shared with the public or can be shared with the public and not harm our national security or whatever, then I’m going to share [it].
“I’m not going to stand for a situation where Central Arkansas Water is being given a bunch of data, and the other stakeholders aren’t seeing the data,” he added. “Is there a risk to Exxon in their mind that somebody like me might make whatever they give me public? Sure. But that’s what happens” when a pipeline runs through a public watershed. “The safety concerns are what’s overriding here. If this information had been public years ago, maybe we could have made some decisions as a community that might have addressed this stuff.”
John Tynan, Central Arkansas Water’s watershed-protection manager, said Tuesday that utility officials would view oil-company documents on a website at a third-party site and that the utility would not have “hard copies,” or printouts, of the documents in its possession. The confidentiality agreement does address the possibility of such copies, though.
For the public, if the utility gets no such documents, there would be none available to request under the Freedom of Information Act.
But Tynan said officials would take notes and those, along with any summaries and other information resulting from the Web viewings, could be available to the public.
An Exxon Mobil spokesman declined comment on whether the company thought the confidentiality agreement was legal under Arkansas law.
Griffin said he will discuss the confidentiality agreement with Tynan and Exxon Mobil.
“If there are legitimate national security concerns such as GPS coordinates for critical parts of a pipeline, that’s one thing, but the idea that everything else has to be somehow hidden” is quite another, he said.
“The attempt to invoke blanket confidentiality for all this stuff is … not going to work,” he said. “That’s just ridiculous.”
Griffin said the oil company has “lost all credibility because of some of the other stuff they’ve fought disclosure of.”
“They say the sky is falling if something becomes public. We put it on the [Internet], and nothing falls,” he said.
It’s important that the pipeline documents be made public, he said, because “the conversation … about our water supply in central Arkansas and the safety of our pipelines … is not a conversation for three people or five people behind closed doors.”
“This is a public conversation. And to have a public conversation with the citizenry engaged, you have to have public information,” he said.
In another development, Exxon Mobil defended the water-pressure levels it used in a 2006 hydrostatic test of the Pegasus pipeline as the company prepared to restart the long-idled line.
In a letter notifying Exxon Mobil of the intent to sue in 60 days if the company doesn’t take appropriate actions, the utility last week said the pressure levels used in the pipeline segment running through the watershed were too low to test the line’s integrity. Rather, the utility said through its attorney, the hydrotest was “woefully inadequate” and appeared “to have been structured solely to establish the maximum operating pressure for the pipeline.”
In an email to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Exxon Mobil spokesman Aaron Stryk said the test “was in full compliance” with federal regulations. “Testing the pipeline’s integrity and establishing a maximum operating pressure can be achieved through a single hydrostatic pressure test” and did so in this case, Stryk wrote.
Stryk said there were benefits in “using the same pressure(s) used on the last hydrostatic test conducted on the Pegasus pipeline in 1991.”
“By using the same pressure, [Exxon Mobil Pipeline Co.’s] integrity experts could perform a direct comparison of the results (apples to apples) and verify that no significant degradation had occurred from 1991 to 2006. A hydrostatic test at a higher pressure would have prevented such a direct comparison,” Stryk wrote.
Asked why anyone would bother to do a higher-pressure hydrostatic test then, Stryk replied, “We have nothing further to add beyond what was provided in the original statement.”
As for Griffin, he said he wasn’t asking if Exxon Mobil had complied with regulations or about the quality of the 2006 test. The question, he said, is why Exxon Mobil didn’t go beyond requirements and do additional tests, especially a higher-pressure test as well, in a high-consequence area such as the Lake Maumelle watershed, especially when the line had been idle for four years.
“This is a case … that screams out for going beyond what is required,” he said.
Griffin said he had asked Exxon Mobil about this matter and has not received an answer.
“If they need [this lower-pressure test] for comparison purposes for 1991, go ahead and do that,” but do the other one, too,” he said. “Is [the pipeline] going to just start leaking oil everywhere? That seems to be more important. That may be a little bit too much common sense for most folks.”
Griffin noted he’s not an engineer but said, “I know enough to know that the point is to make sure the pipe is not going to blow up.”
Stryk said Central Arkansas Water had asked Exxon Mobil before the Mayflower accident to install another pipeline valve in the watershed.
“We both agreed at that time that we would install such a valve in 2013,” he wrote in an email interview. “We were on schedule to do so, but the breach occurred on March 29.”
Also Wednesday, Griffin’s office received Exxon Mobil’s response to the lawsuit-notification letter sent by Central Arkansas Water last week. Stryk said the response also went to the utility and some other elected officials from Arkansas.
In that response, Exxon Mobil’s Jeanne Mitchell, senior director of federal relations, said the company has been “providing unprecedented access to information to regulators, public officials, and CAW” since the Mayflower spill.
“While our investigation is not as expedient as some would like it to be, we will not rush our comprehensive review and analysis,” she wrote.
She added: “While we recognize there is more ahead in the way of additional testing, pipeline validations, and work plan activities, it is not constructive to conduct a separate review outside of what PHMSA [the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration] is already conducting. In the meantime, the Pegasus Pipeline is down, and we will not restart it until we are satisfied it is safe to do so and have the approval of PHMSA.”
And in Little Rock this week, a judge, ruling in U.S. District Court, remanded a lawsuit filed by dozens of Mayflower residents against Exxon Mobil and others to Faulkner County Circuit Court in Conway.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 09/26/2013