Twitter/Tim Griffin

WATER WORRIES: Officials confer on ExxonMobil pipeline and threat to Lake Maumelle. Rep. Tim Griffin is shown talking to Mayor Mark Stodola.

Government officials and others came together today in Little Rock to discuss the ExxonMobil Pegasus pipeline, currently shut down on account of the Mayflower rupture, which runs through 13 miles of the Lake Maumelle watershed. It runs for 15.5 miles between shutoff valves through the land from which Central Arkansas gets virtually all its water supply.


Nobody from ExxonMobil attended, however.

A break like that which occurred in Mayflower, with spillage of some 5,000 barrels of oil, would produce exponential damage to the watershed. One of the two shutoff valves is manually operated, which means it would take longer to reach. The break in Mayflower was followed by a break this week in Missouri, though it caused only a negligible spill of Canadian tar sands crude (which sinks and is not as easily corraled by floating booms on bodies of water) because the pipeline isn’t in operation.


You’ll notice U.S. Rep. Tim “Pipeline” Griffin, who distributed the photo above, was on hand showing concern and assuring all that ExxonMobil, would be meeting with local officials on the watershed later this month. Griffin, one of the leading proponents of the Keystone XL pipeline to carry similar Canadian crude through the Great Plains to Koch family refineries in Texas, has endeavored to distance that project from the Exxon pipeline and assure all that everything will be done to fix things in Arkansas.

Now is the time to make ExxonMobil come to the table. Nobody really believes they’ll move the pipeline out of the watershed as Central Arkansas Water and others have asked (though they could, with ample resources and eminent domain power) in part because moving from one watershed merely moves the line to another. But they darn sure could explain why they did an early pipeline inspection (mentioned again at today’s meeting), what that internal inspection found, what’s the safety factor of the entire length of the 60-year-old line and how quickly the company can install more cutoff valves and more protection of the water in Lake Maumelle. Permission to restart the line is the only chip the public has to get Exxon to do right, and that means more than buying back the nearly two dozen homes in a Mayflower neighborhood soaked deep with oil laced with other dangerous chemicals.


Leslie Peacock was at the meeting and will add a report: