MAYFLOWER - Ashala Doster stood outside the place she once called home as she watched a huge backhoe sink its metal teeth into a nearby house, sending bricks and wood tumbling to the ground.
Her husband, Greg, talked with a state environmental worker as their two little boys, one wearing a Superman T-shirt, dug dirt from what was once a front garden. The red-brick house at 44 N. Starlite Road was the place where a midwife delivered each of their sons, ages 3 and 4. It was the first home the Dosters owned together; they bought it the year they got married.
They’ve not been able to spend a night in the house since Exxon Mobil’s Pegasus pipeline ruptured March 29, just yards from their garage, and they don’t expect to move back.
“It breaks my heart, hearing the cracking,” she said as the nearby house collapsed. This will be happening to her house later, she added softly, though Exxon Mobil said there’s been no decision on its future yet.
More than six months after the pipeline rupture, which Exxon Mobil Pipeline Co. estimates dumped 210,000 gallons of heavy crude oil into the Northwoods subdivision, the company tore down the first two houses with oil beneath their foundations - those at 32 N. Starlite Road and 36 N. Starlite Road - Monday morning.
One at a time, side by side, each of the two houses - surrounded by security fencing and already emptied of their contents - was no more than a pile of rubble about an hour after the yellow backhoe first clawed into its roof.
Out front, a small row of shrubbery with evergreens on each side remained intact after the second house toppled.
The families who formerly lived there were not present. The few neighbors who have returned to the 20 other evacuated homes didn’t turn out to watch the demolition, either.
The only ones present were Exxon Mobil employees, contract workers, city employees - a fire truck, for example, was there to hose down the rubble to prevent dust - and several reporters and photographers. The Dosters stayed at their own home, where they have stopped by occasionally since the spill.
Just one house now stands between the Dosters’ home and the demolished ones, and Exxon Mobil spokesman Aaron Stryk wasn’t sure if anyone is living there now.
An Exxon Mobil spokesman had erroneously said Friday that one of the homes immediately beside the rupture was being destroyed.But Exxon Mobil is still in negotiations to buy the Dosters’ home and won’t decide what to do with it until those talks are complete, Stryk said Monday. There are other options to get rid of the oil in addition to demolition, he said.
The Dosters’ home is the only other one among the 22 houses evacuated that Exxon Mobil believes has oil beneath its foundation, according to information provided by Stryk.
Talking with a former neighbor Monday, Ashala Doster said she, Greg and their children - the boys and her 12-year-old stepdaughter - have moved into a Conway apartment for the time being.
For a while, they lived with relatives in the East End community. But that was an 82-mile round trip to thegirl’s school in Mayflower.
Exxon Mobil is paying the family’s living expenses since their Northwoods house has never been cleared for safe re-entry, Ashala Doster said. But she said, “To get that [money] was torture every month and still is.”
When asked if Exxon Mobil had been cooperative with the family since their home was among those hardest hit, she said: “For the first five months, absolutely not.”
“But in the last month, they’ve come around,” she added
She credits Jamie Gates, a Conway Area Chamber of Commerce official who has recently contracted with Exxon Mobil to work with families affected by the spill.
She said state and federal government officials “were shocked” to learn in June that Exxon Mobil had not told her and her husband that oil was beneath their home, even though the company knew of its presence.
Stryk said the unified command - representatives from state, local and federal agencies, along with Exxon Mobil - had decided at the time that command representatives, without the presence of Exxon Mobil, would notify families whose property still needed oil removed.
While some people might be surprised that the spill was serious enough to result in housing demolitions, Doster said she wasn’t.
“I’ve always known. I didn’t know how much the public knew,” she said.
The oil hit the Dosters’ side and back yards but not the front, where the grass and a neat garden featuring crape myrtle and other plants remains intact.
“This all looks fine,” she said of the front yard. But in the backyard, “There’s not a tree back there,” she said of the land where there once had been many. “There’s a huge trench” that workers have dug along the back of the house.
She said Exxon Mobil representatives had told her and her husband that solutions other than destroying the house include picking it up and moving it farther back or using a sophisticated vacuum-like mechanism to remove the oil.
But she said, “I don’t want to live in a contaminated house.” And she doesn’t even think she “can move back to Mayflower” after so much has happened here.
She wants to get settled, though. The little boys don’t understand what all has happened and there’s been “a lot of crying,” she said.
“They don’t have their toys” or the same playmates they had here, she said.
On Monday afternoon, workers began removing the debris from the demolished houses.
The next step is to remove the contaminated soil, refill the ground with with clean soil, grade it and then sod the lots with grass.
Stryk said Exxon Mobil has not decided what to do with the lots.
“Right now the focus is on getting the remediation done, then we can start looking at that,” he said.
The Pegasus pipeline, built in 1947 and 1948, ruptured beneath the ground on the afternoon of Good Friday. The thick Canadian crude oil flowed into yards, a street, ditches and a cove of Lake Conway.
Exxon Mobil shut down the 850-mile-long pipeline, which runs from Illinois to the Texas Gulf Coast, shortly after the spill and has not reopened it.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 10/08/2013