“Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and caldron bubble.” - CHANT OF THE THREE WITCHES IN SHAKESPEARE’S MACBETH Last March in Mayfl ower, near Conway, 210,000 gallons of crude oil and the chemicals within it flowed onto Arkansas soil and into her water.
Exxon, the parent of the 65-year-old pipeline with a 22-foot long crack, has now done its cleanup routine and continues to say the pollution went no farther than a cove in Lake Conway.
How chemicals can become stationary and not circulate or contaminate other parts of a lake is still a mystery to me, but that’s been Exxon’s story, and they’re sticking to it. Nevertheless, exactly which chemicals, and in what quantities, the residents and the environment will be dealing with over an unknown span of time is still anyone’s guess.
Also in March 2013, a Lion Oil refinery spill from a broken pump and oil storage tank sent 63,000 gallons down three miles of a creek near Magnolia in south Arkansas. Another leak in the same county occurred in September 2013 of an undetermined amount down another creek. Media coverage of these events was almost non-existent so we can only hope some watchdogs are taking notes in a part of our state not known for stringent attention to environmental mishaps.
The largest oil spill on U.S. soil was probably theLakeview, Calif., blowout well in 1910, which shot a 9 million gallon geyser of oil for 18 months. A hundred years later, in July 2010, almost 900,000 gallons of heavy crude oil fl owed from a broken pipeline into Michigan’s Kalamazoo River polluting 36 miles of the waterway. And, in July 2011 an Exxon pipe under the flooding Yellowstone River burst adding some 63,000 gallons of oil to the water of Montana, a state with 9,000 pipeline crossings of its waterways. This past September a farmer in North Dakota discovered a gigantic pipeline leak in his wheat field that had gone undetected for 11 days.
Early detection is more often due to residents’ discoveries than company monitors, according to a Wall Street Journal review of 251 pipeline incidents. This safety gap of awareness and response is not very reassuring, when considering the ramifications of a Keystone pipeline’s opportunities for devastation. The southern segment of this monster opened last week.
Oftshore spills such as the 2010 BP leak in the Gulf of Mexico dwarf the land polluters. BP’s Deepwater Horizon well gushed for 87 days churning 210 million gallons of oil throughout the sea, into estuaries, wetlands, and beaches, and claimed thousands, or millions, of sea creatures and plants as well as 11 human lives.
We will never know the numbers of human and animal illnesses that might be associated with exposure and/or ingestion of this oil and the almost 2 million gallons of chemical dispersant used to sink it out of sight.
This month, a chemical, of which little is known or understood except that it’s used in processing coal, leaked into a West Virginia river aft ecting the lives of 300,000 people in nine counties. U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W. Va., issued a statement saying thousands of miles of water mains werecontaminated, and people were not supposed to drink, cook, wash, shower, or otherwise touch their water.
Depending heavily on the old, “Dilution is the solution to pollution” notion, authorities started easing oft water restrictions four days after the Freedom Industries spill, although still advising pregnant women not to drink the water. That company has now, conveniently, declared bankruptcy.
Do we really know what both the high and low doses of such chemical exposures will cause? No, because, like tens of thousands ofchemicals allowed in the marketplace, there are no studies proving their benign or malignant levels on living things. With few guidelines and little knowledge for what the long-term consequences look like with scores of chemical pollutants, we are reacting blindly after accidents.
Ironically the travesty of our national environmental condition was playing out in Congress at the same time West Virginians were smelling licorice-like odors in their blue-tinted tap water. The U.S. House, with the help of all four of Arkansas’ Republican representatives, passed some changes “to scale back the federal Superfund law by shifting some of its enforcement authority to states and easing requirements on companies to obtain insurance to pay for cleaning up their own toxic waste.” In other words, taxpayers, or no one, will clean up a lot of these messes if that’s even possible.
FRAN ALEXANDER IS A FAYETTEVILLE RESIDENT WITH A LONGSTANDING INTEREST IN THE ENVIRONMENT AND AN OPINION ON ALMOST ANYTHING ELSE.
Opinion, Pages 11 on 01/26/2014