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Friday, April 05, 2013 3:19:53 PM
Arkansas town in lockdown after oil spill nightmare
By Suzi Parker 5 Apr 2013 6:51 AM
There’s one Exxon gas station in Mayflower, Ark.
Before last Friday, that’s likely as close as Mayflower residents got to the multinational oil and gas behemoth ExxonMobil. But after the Pegasus Pipeline burst last Friday, sending thousands of gallons of tar-sands oil into the Northwoods neighborhood, the company became omnipresent in this small town of 2,200 people.
The first thing you notice when driving into Mayflower is the stench. Travelers can smell the fumes from Interstate 40, which runs through the town. Within town limits, the smell is putrid: Imagine wet asphalt on a hot summer’s day — times 10,000. At the local Harp’s grocery, something less than half a mile from the spill, the stink makes your eyes water and your nose burn.
But the reek is only a hint at ExxonMobil’s presence here. Since thick black sludge first began oozing across backyards and into the streets, surprising many residents who say they didn’t even realize the pipeline was there, the company has instituted something like martial law.
Bank signs that once advertised interest rates and loan information now flash, “Thank you for your help and patience Mayflower,” along with a toll-free number residents can call to make financial claims to ExxonMobil. Company workers wearing logoed shirts roam throughout the town. Local police guard the entrance to the neighborhood where the spill happened. On Starlite Road, where oil flowed down the street last week, workers vacuum up oil in yards and steam-wash pavement.
The oil company has also taken over wildlife rescue from a local organization; independent rescuers report that they are being forced to leave private property by ExxonMobil enforcers. (Casualties so far include oil-covered ducks, snakes, and nutria.) Reporters who accompanied Arkansas Attorney General Dustin McDaniel on a tour of the spill on Wednesday were asked to leave by Exxon representatives. Even the state Department of Environmental Quality refers reporters to the Exxon downstream media line for information.
Earlier this week, ExxonMobil requested — and received — a temporary no-fly zone over the oil spill. A local newspaper reported that the only aircraft allowed in the area were those under the direction of Tom Suhrhoff, who according to LinkedIn is an aviation adviser at ExxonMobil. After a two-day prohibition, some media were allowed to fly over on Thursday.
Even the Mayflower High School’s cafeteria was ExxonMobil turf on Tuesday night when the company held a meeting for residents in the affected neighborhood, where 22 homes remain evacuated. Reporters were barred from that event, but an activist who slipped in said the Environmental Protection Agency, the state Department of Health, and the county judge all spoke along with ExxonMobil officials.
Mayflower residents should get used to their new reality, says Ernest DelBuono, a senior vice president and Crisis Practice Chair at LEVICK, a strategic communications firm in Washington, D.C. “Exxon is going to do what they have to do clean it up,” DelBuono says. “They will be judged in courts on how quickly and efficiently they cleaned it up.”
But DelBuono, a former Coast Guard official who was in charge of communications for the Exxon Valdez cleanup, says that usually there is a keen federal presence in such spills. During the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, he says, BP may have been running the show, but there was an orchestrated effort to keep the company out of public briefings. Those were handled by federal government officials from various agencies.
The BP disaster was a different beast because it involved various states and overlapping jurisdictions. And the Mayflower spill is much smaller. But DelBuono says that a prominent federal and state presence is still needed in these crises. And while Exxon spends its time reassuring residents that cleanup is going according to plan, it’s very clear that life is far from normal.
The 65-year-old Pegasus Pipeline ruptured in the Northwoods neighborhood, just off the town’s main highway, which is lined with dollar stores and a Sonic drive-in. The thick tar-sands oil ran into creeks and tributaries throughout the area. ExxonMobil officials have repeatedly said that they prevented any runoff into Lake Conway, a popular fishing and recreation spot. The company reports that it has placed barriers and 3,600 feet of boom around the lake. Aerial photos, however, show oil in marshes near the lake, and another photo shows dead vegetation in the lake.
And then there’s that stench. Exxon sent a mailer to Mayflower residents stating, in part, “Although you may smell an odor, current air quality readings are below levels likely to cause health effects with the exception of the clean-up areas where the emergency responders are directly working.”
It’s unclear what exactly is in these fumes, but previous tar-sands leaks include toxic natural gas liquids and other petrochemical diluents. And the fumes appear to be seriously affecting people.
Eight school children went home sick on Monday from Mayflower schools. Ed Barham, spokesman for the Arkansas Department of Health, said that air monitors are now in and around the school. “There were not levels of benzene that would be harmful,” Barham said of the children’s illnesses. “We don’t have evidence that they were sick because of the oil.”
Tracy Wilson, a resident of nearby Conway, Ark., says that her parents, who are in their 60s and have health issues, live about a mile away from the site. Both have been getting sicker since Sunday, she says, with upset stomachs, headaches, and burning noses. She spent all day Wednesday calling agencies, including the Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, but continued to get “the runaround.”
“People who live outside that neighborhood [on the fringes of the evacuation zone] have no clue what is going on,” Wilson says. “I want to know from the health department what they should be treated for if they go to a doctor.”
Wilson also called the ExxonMobil claims office on Wednesday. She said a company representative returned her call on late Wednesday offering to put her parents in a hotel room and reimburse them for any medical expenses. But Wilson said she wondered what strings were attached to the offer. Still, on Thursday, her parents accepted a company-sponsored hotel room and food allowance.
ExxonMobil reported Thursday in its daily email release to reporters that 640 workers are responding to the cleanup along with local, state, and federal officials. The company reports that 12,000 barrels of oil and water were recovered in the first few days of the spill. More than half of the impacted soil has been removed from six yards. It’s unclear when the evacuated families will be able to return to their homes.
The spill comes at a critical moment. Environmental groups are pushing against the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, which would ferry oil from Canada’s tar sands to refineries in Texas, passing through Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma. The pipeline needs the Obama administration’s approval to finalize its permitting. Keystone Blockaders are currently in Mayflower documenting the oil spill.
They aren’t the only ones. Attorney General McDaniel has demanded that ExxonMobil produce investigative reports, inspection reports, and other information connected to pipeline rupture and oil spill by April 10.
“The people of Arkansas deserve a full explanation from Exxon about how this incident occurred and the extent of damages to private property and to our state’s natural resources,” McDaniel said. “My office is determined to get that explanation through our investigation because, at the moment, we still have many more questions than we do answers.”
http://grist.org/climate-energy/arkansas-town-in-lockdown-after-oil-spill-nightmare/
I'm sure you all know that Obama was in N. Ca. a few days ago .. doing the TWO - STEP with big donors who are EXTREMELY AGAINST keystone .... just wow! ...... he is good at this... ;) HERE it is ... . . .
Obama Tells Donors of Tough Politics of Environment
President Obama in San Francisco on Thursday, beginning the second half of a two-day fund-raising trip to Northern California.
Kamala D. Harris
By MICHAEL D. SHEAR
April 4, 2013
SAN FRANCISCO — Appearing at the home of an outspoken critic of the Keystone XL pipeline, President Obama on Wednesday night told a group of high-dollar donors that the politics of the environment “are tough.”
Mr. Obama appears to be leaning toward the approval of the pipeline, although he did not specifically mention it to the donors. But he acknowledged that it is hard to sell aggressive environmental action — like reducing pollution from power plants — to Americans who are still struggling in a difficult economy to pay bills, buy gas and save for retirement.
“You may be concerned about the temperature of the planet, but it’s probably not rising to your No. 1 concern,” Mr. Obama said. “And if people think, well, that’s shortsighted, that’s what happens when you’re struggling to get by.”
Mr. Obama delivered his remarks to a group that hardly needs to worry economically: Thomas F. Steyer, the hedge-fund billionaire, and his wife, Kat Taylor, along with 100 guests at their home who each paid $5,000 to $32,400. The event was the first of four over two days in Northern California, the president’s first fund-raising drive in hopes of winning a friendlier Congress in 2014.
On Thursday, Mr. Obama wound up his trip with a fund-raiser in suburban Atherton, where he ran through his usual agenda: immigration, gun control and greater investment infrastructure. But his comments about Kamala D. Harris,the California attorney general, drew the most notice on the Internet.
“She is brilliant and she is dedicated and she is tough. And she is exactly what you’d want in anybody who is administering the law, and making sure that everybody is getting a fair shake,” the president said. “She also happens to be by far the best-looking attorney general in the country.”
As for the pipeline, the State Department, which has jurisdiction over the project because it crosses an international border, will hold a public hearing on an environmental impact statement, on April 18 in Grand Island, Neb. The review process for the pipeline, which would carry heavy crude oil from Alberta’s tar sands to refineries on the Gulf Coast, is expected to last until summer.
The challenge for Mr. Obama is to find a way to balance the political demands of supporters like Mr. Steyer, who has criticized the pipeline, with the insistence of Republicans, Canadian officials and some unions that the pipeline will create jobs and lower the cost of fuel in the United States. The president also faces pressure from some members of his party who argue that the economic benefits of the pipeline are too important to ignore. Last month, 17 Democratic senators signed on to an amendment backing construction of the pipeline. Included in the group were seven senators from conservative or swing states who are up for re-election in 2014.
In the face of those pressures, at the fund-raiser on Wednesday — and at a second one at the home of the billionaire philanthropists Ann and Gordon Getty — the president sought to reassure his supporters that he would continue to fight for environmentally friendly policies.
“Despite a very aggressive agenda on the other side to block action, we’ve been able to double fuel-efficiency standards on cars,” Mr. Obama said at Mr. Steyer’s home. “We’ve been able to take mercury out of our air. We have been able to reduce carbon emissions in this country and have made not only this a healthier place to live, but have also begun to address in a serious way one of the biggest challenges of our time, and that is the challenge of climate change.”
Later, at the Getty home, the president said the political debate needs to “break out of this notion that somehow there’s a contradiction between us being good stewards of the environment and us growing this economy.”
“They are not a contradiction,” he said. “We can grow this economy fast and faster if we are seizing the opportunities of the future and not just looking at the energy sources of the past.”
Even as he spoke at the second fund-raiser, about 100 opponents of the pipeline protested outside, waving signs and chanting, “What do we want from our president? No pipeline for the 1 percent!” and “When I say pipeline you say kill! Pipeline! Kill!”
Inside, Mr. Obama told the donors that the best way to assure environmental action is to send more Democrats to Washington, returning the House to Democratic control and putting Representative Nancy Pelosi of California back in the speaker’s office.
“If we’re going to deal with climate change in a serious way, then we’ve got to have folks in Congress, even when it’s not politically convenient, to talk about it and advocate for it,” he said.
Earlier in the evening, the president said he was eager to work with Republicans who were willing to compromise. But he said he needed more Democrats to fully achieve an agenda his adversaries were trying to block.
Related
Pipeline Spills Stir New Criticism of Keystone Plan
[ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/03/us/pipeline-spills-stir-new-criticism-of-keystone-proposal.html?ref=politics ]
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/05/us/politics/obama-donors-keystone-pipeline.html
By Suzi Parker 5 Apr 2013 6:51 AM
There’s one Exxon gas station in Mayflower, Ark.
Before last Friday, that’s likely as close as Mayflower residents got to the multinational oil and gas behemoth ExxonMobil. But after the Pegasus Pipeline burst last Friday, sending thousands of gallons of tar-sands oil into the Northwoods neighborhood, the company became omnipresent in this small town of 2,200 people.
The first thing you notice when driving into Mayflower is the stench. Travelers can smell the fumes from Interstate 40, which runs through the town. Within town limits, the smell is putrid: Imagine wet asphalt on a hot summer’s day — times 10,000. At the local Harp’s grocery, something less than half a mile from the spill, the stink makes your eyes water and your nose burn.
But the reek is only a hint at ExxonMobil’s presence here. Since thick black sludge first began oozing across backyards and into the streets, surprising many residents who say they didn’t even realize the pipeline was there, the company has instituted something like martial law.
Bank signs that once advertised interest rates and loan information now flash, “Thank you for your help and patience Mayflower,” along with a toll-free number residents can call to make financial claims to ExxonMobil. Company workers wearing logoed shirts roam throughout the town. Local police guard the entrance to the neighborhood where the spill happened. On Starlite Road, where oil flowed down the street last week, workers vacuum up oil in yards and steam-wash pavement.
The oil company has also taken over wildlife rescue from a local organization; independent rescuers report that they are being forced to leave private property by ExxonMobil enforcers. (Casualties so far include oil-covered ducks, snakes, and nutria.) Reporters who accompanied Arkansas Attorney General Dustin McDaniel on a tour of the spill on Wednesday were asked to leave by Exxon representatives. Even the state Department of Environmental Quality refers reporters to the Exxon downstream media line for information.
Earlier this week, ExxonMobil requested — and received — a temporary no-fly zone over the oil spill. A local newspaper reported that the only aircraft allowed in the area were those under the direction of Tom Suhrhoff, who according to LinkedIn is an aviation adviser at ExxonMobil. After a two-day prohibition, some media were allowed to fly over on Thursday.
Even the Mayflower High School’s cafeteria was ExxonMobil turf on Tuesday night when the company held a meeting for residents in the affected neighborhood, where 22 homes remain evacuated. Reporters were barred from that event, but an activist who slipped in said the Environmental Protection Agency, the state Department of Health, and the county judge all spoke along with ExxonMobil officials.
Mayflower residents should get used to their new reality, says Ernest DelBuono, a senior vice president and Crisis Practice Chair at LEVICK, a strategic communications firm in Washington, D.C. “Exxon is going to do what they have to do clean it up,” DelBuono says. “They will be judged in courts on how quickly and efficiently they cleaned it up.”
But DelBuono, a former Coast Guard official who was in charge of communications for the Exxon Valdez cleanup, says that usually there is a keen federal presence in such spills. During the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, he says, BP may have been running the show, but there was an orchestrated effort to keep the company out of public briefings. Those were handled by federal government officials from various agencies.
The BP disaster was a different beast because it involved various states and overlapping jurisdictions. And the Mayflower spill is much smaller. But DelBuono says that a prominent federal and state presence is still needed in these crises. And while Exxon spends its time reassuring residents that cleanup is going according to plan, it’s very clear that life is far from normal.
The 65-year-old Pegasus Pipeline ruptured in the Northwoods neighborhood, just off the town’s main highway, which is lined with dollar stores and a Sonic drive-in. The thick tar-sands oil ran into creeks and tributaries throughout the area. ExxonMobil officials have repeatedly said that they prevented any runoff into Lake Conway, a popular fishing and recreation spot. The company reports that it has placed barriers and 3,600 feet of boom around the lake. Aerial photos, however, show oil in marshes near the lake, and another photo shows dead vegetation in the lake.
And then there’s that stench. Exxon sent a mailer to Mayflower residents stating, in part, “Although you may smell an odor, current air quality readings are below levels likely to cause health effects with the exception of the clean-up areas where the emergency responders are directly working.”
It’s unclear what exactly is in these fumes, but previous tar-sands leaks include toxic natural gas liquids and other petrochemical diluents. And the fumes appear to be seriously affecting people.
Eight school children went home sick on Monday from Mayflower schools. Ed Barham, spokesman for the Arkansas Department of Health, said that air monitors are now in and around the school. “There were not levels of benzene that would be harmful,” Barham said of the children’s illnesses. “We don’t have evidence that they were sick because of the oil.”
Tracy Wilson, a resident of nearby Conway, Ark., says that her parents, who are in their 60s and have health issues, live about a mile away from the site. Both have been getting sicker since Sunday, she says, with upset stomachs, headaches, and burning noses. She spent all day Wednesday calling agencies, including the Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, but continued to get “the runaround.”
“People who live outside that neighborhood [on the fringes of the evacuation zone] have no clue what is going on,” Wilson says. “I want to know from the health department what they should be treated for if they go to a doctor.”
Wilson also called the ExxonMobil claims office on Wednesday. She said a company representative returned her call on late Wednesday offering to put her parents in a hotel room and reimburse them for any medical expenses. But Wilson said she wondered what strings were attached to the offer. Still, on Thursday, her parents accepted a company-sponsored hotel room and food allowance.
ExxonMobil reported Thursday in its daily email release to reporters that 640 workers are responding to the cleanup along with local, state, and federal officials. The company reports that 12,000 barrels of oil and water were recovered in the first few days of the spill. More than half of the impacted soil has been removed from six yards. It’s unclear when the evacuated families will be able to return to their homes.
The spill comes at a critical moment. Environmental groups are pushing against the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, which would ferry oil from Canada’s tar sands to refineries in Texas, passing through Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma. The pipeline needs the Obama administration’s approval to finalize its permitting. Keystone Blockaders are currently in Mayflower documenting the oil spill.
They aren’t the only ones. Attorney General McDaniel has demanded that ExxonMobil produce investigative reports, inspection reports, and other information connected to pipeline rupture and oil spill by April 10.
“The people of Arkansas deserve a full explanation from Exxon about how this incident occurred and the extent of damages to private property and to our state’s natural resources,” McDaniel said. “My office is determined to get that explanation through our investigation because, at the moment, we still have many more questions than we do answers.”
http://grist.org/climate-energy/arkansas-town-in-lockdown-after-oil-spill-nightmare/
I'm sure you all know that Obama was in N. Ca. a few days ago .. doing the TWO - STEP with big donors who are EXTREMELY AGAINST keystone .... just wow! ...... he is good at this... ;) HERE it is ... . . .
Obama Tells Donors of Tough Politics of Environment
President Obama in San Francisco on Thursday, beginning the second half of a two-day fund-raising trip to Northern California.
Kamala D. Harris
By MICHAEL D. SHEAR
April 4, 2013
SAN FRANCISCO — Appearing at the home of an outspoken critic of the Keystone XL pipeline, President Obama on Wednesday night told a group of high-dollar donors that the politics of the environment “are tough.”
Mr. Obama appears to be leaning toward the approval of the pipeline, although he did not specifically mention it to the donors. But he acknowledged that it is hard to sell aggressive environmental action — like reducing pollution from power plants — to Americans who are still struggling in a difficult economy to pay bills, buy gas and save for retirement.
“You may be concerned about the temperature of the planet, but it’s probably not rising to your No. 1 concern,” Mr. Obama said. “And if people think, well, that’s shortsighted, that’s what happens when you’re struggling to get by.”
Mr. Obama delivered his remarks to a group that hardly needs to worry economically: Thomas F. Steyer, the hedge-fund billionaire, and his wife, Kat Taylor, along with 100 guests at their home who each paid $5,000 to $32,400. The event was the first of four over two days in Northern California, the president’s first fund-raising drive in hopes of winning a friendlier Congress in 2014.
On Thursday, Mr. Obama wound up his trip with a fund-raiser in suburban Atherton, where he ran through his usual agenda: immigration, gun control and greater investment infrastructure. But his comments about Kamala D. Harris,the California attorney general, drew the most notice on the Internet.
“She is brilliant and she is dedicated and she is tough. And she is exactly what you’d want in anybody who is administering the law, and making sure that everybody is getting a fair shake,” the president said. “She also happens to be by far the best-looking attorney general in the country.”
As for the pipeline, the State Department, which has jurisdiction over the project because it crosses an international border, will hold a public hearing on an environmental impact statement, on April 18 in Grand Island, Neb. The review process for the pipeline, which would carry heavy crude oil from Alberta’s tar sands to refineries on the Gulf Coast, is expected to last until summer.
The challenge for Mr. Obama is to find a way to balance the political demands of supporters like Mr. Steyer, who has criticized the pipeline, with the insistence of Republicans, Canadian officials and some unions that the pipeline will create jobs and lower the cost of fuel in the United States. The president also faces pressure from some members of his party who argue that the economic benefits of the pipeline are too important to ignore. Last month, 17 Democratic senators signed on to an amendment backing construction of the pipeline. Included in the group were seven senators from conservative or swing states who are up for re-election in 2014.
In the face of those pressures, at the fund-raiser on Wednesday — and at a second one at the home of the billionaire philanthropists Ann and Gordon Getty — the president sought to reassure his supporters that he would continue to fight for environmentally friendly policies.
“Despite a very aggressive agenda on the other side to block action, we’ve been able to double fuel-efficiency standards on cars,” Mr. Obama said at Mr. Steyer’s home. “We’ve been able to take mercury out of our air. We have been able to reduce carbon emissions in this country and have made not only this a healthier place to live, but have also begun to address in a serious way one of the biggest challenges of our time, and that is the challenge of climate change.”
Later, at the Getty home, the president said the political debate needs to “break out of this notion that somehow there’s a contradiction between us being good stewards of the environment and us growing this economy.”
“They are not a contradiction,” he said. “We can grow this economy fast and faster if we are seizing the opportunities of the future and not just looking at the energy sources of the past.”
Even as he spoke at the second fund-raiser, about 100 opponents of the pipeline protested outside, waving signs and chanting, “What do we want from our president? No pipeline for the 1 percent!” and “When I say pipeline you say kill! Pipeline! Kill!”
Inside, Mr. Obama told the donors that the best way to assure environmental action is to send more Democrats to Washington, returning the House to Democratic control and putting Representative Nancy Pelosi of California back in the speaker’s office.
“If we’re going to deal with climate change in a serious way, then we’ve got to have folks in Congress, even when it’s not politically convenient, to talk about it and advocate for it,” he said.
Earlier in the evening, the president said he was eager to work with Republicans who were willing to compromise. But he said he needed more Democrats to fully achieve an agenda his adversaries were trying to block.
Related
Pipeline Spills Stir New Criticism of Keystone Plan
[ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/03/us/pipeline-spills-stir-new-criticism-of-keystone-proposal.html?ref=politics ]
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/05/us/politics/obama-donors-keystone-pipeline.html
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