WASHINGTON—Pictures don’t lie. And as much as some would like to write off the oil-drenched images flying across Facebook and Twitter Monday as an April Fool’s joke gone rogue, they are real.

That actually is a river of Alberta crude gushing through an Arkansas suburb. And gushing onward to YouTube, virally, throughout Easter weekend.

Like Jed Clampett’s worst nightmare, Canada’s diluted oilsands bitumen has never looked so ugly, coursing for the first time across the driveways of everyday Americans.

The black ooze comes as yet another black eye to Canada, just as the Obama White House readies to make a final call on Keystone XL. America’s already tortured pipeline politics just got stickier.

But looks can be deceiving. And thus far, all indications suggest this latest rupture in Mayflower, Ark., though classified as “major” by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, may wreak about a third or less of the damage of the damage done during the 2010 Kalamazoo River spill, which saw more than a million gallons of Alberta crude pour into a Michigan waterway.

All oil spills are bad. Some are worse than others. Measuring any new spill against the worst ever is in no way meant to make you feel warm and fuzzy inside. But for the sake of context, here are some essential differences between the Kalamazoo leak three summers ago versus Mayflower today:

Call it the Keystone Kops factor. U.S. investigators ultimately fingered Enbridge Inc. for rank incompetence in 2010, when Alberta crude gushed for a stunning 17 hours before the flow was cut by the pipeline’s overseers in Edmonton.

Early reports out of Mayflower, Ark., suggest Friday afternoon’s leak was staunched within two hours. ExxonMobil Pipeline officials initially estimated the spill at “a few thousand barrels” and then mobilized cleanup crews capable of mopping 10,000 barrels. By midday Monday, company spokesman Alan Jeffers told ArkansasOnline.com the spill was expected to be “much less.”

Volume. Assuming the worst — 10,000 barrels — would place the Mayflower spill about a third as severe as Kalamazoo, by volume. If it is nearer to 5,000 barrels or less, as some reports suggest, the fraction gets correspondingly smaller. Yet even this amount is likely to measure worse than the 2011 rupture of ExxonMobil’s Silver Tip pipeline, which spilled 1,000 barrels of Alberta crude into the Yellowstone River.

The 2010 Michigan spill, it is worth remembering, cost nearly $1 billion to clean up, in part, because Alberta diluted bitumen, or dilbit, sinks in water, unlike most conventional oil, forcing the costly dredging of spill zones as part of the cleanup regimen.

Officials in Arkansas say the spill in Mayflower, which leaked into some drainage areas, was stopped short of Lake Conway, the nearest and most vulnerable body of water, and there is nothing as yet in the blogosphere to suggest otherwise. If the ExxonMobil cleanup team is able to hold that line, the grimmest possible outcome will be averted.

Eyes, And Noses, On The Ground. The mess in the Kalamazoo was remote, whereas the Mayflower spill happened literally under the noses of nearby residents, some of whom were unaware Exxon’s Pegasus pipeline even existed. While Exxon claims its system of electronic sensors sounded the spill alarm, the fact that homeowners dialed 911 within minutes of the first noxious whiff ensured as rapid a response as possible.

Paradoxically, it is the sheer nearness to people — again, a river of oil flowing into suburban America — that appears to be giving the Mayflower spill a viral power that Kalamazoo never had. Canadian goop in a faraway watershed is one thing, but right there on the sidewalk where little Johnnie and Janie first learned to play catch is another. Beaver Cleaver now needs a steam bath, if not outright lung detox. June and Ward are not amused.

Small wonder then that the already wildly politicized battle lines over Keystone XL are bristling anew in the wake of Mayflower.

As the images from Mayflower fan outward, the climate campaign against Keystone XL intensified Monday, with leading opponents arguing that the planned pipeline will be even bigger than what currently exists.

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“We’d be wise to think about this as one more sad warning, like the spills in Kalamazoo and the Yellowstone River,” Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, said in a statement.

“What the people of Arkansas are enduring today is a reminder of why approving KXL, a pipeline 10 times as large and running across the Ogallala Aquifer, defines a bad idea.”

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