The National Transportation Safety Board has twice recommended that a federal agency require pipeline operators to disclose information on the products being shipped before an accident occurs so that emergency responders can be adequately prepared, but two of Arkansas’ state agencies said they do not recall getting such advance information.
Compliance with the recommendation is voluntary because the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration has neither adopted nor rejected the suggestion since the board first made it in 2011.
As for Exxon Mobil, it isn’t saying if it provided state and local agencies information on the kind of heavy crude being carried in the Pegasus pipeline that ruptured in a Mayflower subdivision on March 29 and spilled an estimated 210,000 gallons of oil into the Northwoods subdivision, two drainage ditches and a cove of Lake Conway.
Most of the 22 homes evacuated shortly after that spill remain unoccupied, and two of them have been demolished.
Exxon Mobil Corp. spokesman Aaron Stryk - asked if the company went above requirements and provided emergency responders with a list of diluents, or ingredients mixed with the thick oil before the spill - said, “We have no comment.”
Among the ingredients often used to dilute heavy crude oil often is the carcinogen benzene.
Spokesmen for the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality and the Arkansas Department of Health, however, said last week that they did not recall or know of getting an advance list.
One agency that said it did get a list in advance was Central Arkansas Water, which oversees the Lake Maumelle watershed through which part of the 850-mile-long pipeline runs. Lake Maumelle is the drinking-water source for more than 400,000 in central Arkansas.
John Tynan, the utility’s watershed protection manager, said the utility got a list of ingredients - for Cold Lake crude oil - from the company before the spill. Afterward, Tynan said, Exxon Mobil gave CAW information sheets on the diluents used in Wabasca Heavy, which is the oil the company has said was involved in the Mayflower accident.
One of the post-spill product sheets, given by Exxon Mobil to the utility and prepared by Cenovus Energy Inc., says Cold Lake blend and Wabasca Heavy are synonyms for the heavy crude oil and diluent mix being described. But those two types of oil are not identical, according to a Canadian crude-oil monitoring site, crudemonitor.ca.
Documents given to CAW after the spill, Tynan said, “go into greater detail” on the product’s makeup and “include additional constituents,” Tynan said. “Whether or not there are still additional ones beyond that is a question we also have.”
It’s unclear how much any advance sheets would have helped in the Pegasus accident. Stryk said in an email interview that Exxon Mobil ships “multiple crudes” and that the Pegasus “is a common carrier pipeline.” Asked if that meant it might carry different kinds of oil at different times, he replied, “Correct.”
On whether the Environmental Quality Department would have benefited from having detailed product information before the accident, department spokesman Katherine Benenati said, “Looking back on the response, we don’t think we would have done anything differently in the immediate aftermath. Shortly after the accident, we had detailed information on the material involved and it has guided our response.”
Information provided on the product after the spill, “as well as the results from sampling, gave us more precise details on the chemical and physical make up [of] the material we’re dealing with,”Benenati said in an email interview Friday.
Tynan said he expects “that CAW would like to see some changes … in both a containment or response action and potentially how cleanup occurs. … Depending on the chemical constituents of the product that is being moved,” different measures “may need to be in place.”
Gov. Mike Beebe shares a similar view.
“The governor feels it’s important for our regulatory agencies but also for our first responders to have a comprehensive understanding … of what’s being transported,” Beebe spokesman Matt De-Cample said Sunday.
“The more disclosures that we have within proper guidelines, the more prepared they’ll be and the better protected … those areas will be” if a spill happens, DeCample added.
In a recommendation, first made in 2011, the transportation board urged the regulatory pipeline agency to require “operators of natural gas transmission and distribution pipelines and hazardous liquid pipelines to provide system-specific information about their pipeline systems to the emergency response agencies of the communities and jurisdictions in which those pipelines are located.
“This information should include pipe diameter, operating pressure, product transported, and potential impact radius,” the board added.
The board said in 2012 that it was reiterating that recommendation, in light of a major oil spill in Michigan in 2010. That accident caused so many problems that the cleanup of the Kalamazoo River continues more than three years later. Both that oil and the Wabasca Heavy crude that spilled in Mayflower are considered diluted bitumen in that they are diluted with various ingredients.
In Michigan, the Enbridge Inc. pipeline was carrying 77 percent Cold Lake and 23 percent Western Canadian Select crude, both heavy oils from western Canada, according to Enbridge.
One of the sheets that Exxon Mobil gave Central Arkansas Water also lists West Canadian Select as a synonym for Wabasca Heavy. Yet West Canadian Select is in a different category of oil on the Canadian crude-monitoring website.
Transportation board spokesman Keith Holloway said Friday that the board wants the information provided before a spill so thatagencies can be better prepared. That way, they “may see something ahead of time” that would help them when an accident does occur, he said.
Arkansas Health Department spokesman Cathy Flanagin said the agency did not get the product data before the accident but got the data “not long after the spill.”
Having those details beforehand, she said, “would not have changed the response or decisions made by” the department.
“Evacuation decisions are made by local authorities or the on-scene incident commander.”
Flanagin said air samples taken by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and by Exxon’s contractors “looked for the same components in any oil.”
“We interpreted and analyzed the air data,” she added. “The levels of each component might have been different and our analysis would have noted that but we would have been looking at the same components.”
In an April 5 letter, the EPA asked Exxon Mobil to provide “any unique oil spill cleanup strategies implemented by Exxon or its response contractors due to the constituents of the material” discharged in Mayflower.
In an April 10 response, Richard E. Byrne, an Exxon Mobil attorney, said the subsidiary Exxon Mobil Pipeline Co. had not “implemented any unique oil spill cleanup strategies due to the constituents of the material released/ discharged on March 29 … but has employed oil spill cleanup strategies that would ordinarily be done for a crude oil release of this nature and scope.”
In an email, Stryk said, “First response actions would generally be the same for a pipeline spill of any crude oil because the primary public health and safety issues are the same: (1) the oil’s flammability and (2) the presence of benzene and hydrogen sulfide.
“Likewise, approaches to responding, containing and cleaning up a pipeline oil spill are the same regardless of how the crude oil is produced (conventional or non-conventional production). ExxonMobil and its oil spill response contractors stock a variety of response tools, materials and equipment and are trained to address spilled oils based on their physical and toxicological characteristics. In this incident, the Wabasca Heavy that was spilled at Mayflower floated because it had a specific gravity less than that of water.”
In Mayflower, he said, Exxon Mobil has relied on various cleanup techniques, including booms and skimmers, the washing of affected areas, vacuum trucks, the use of sorbent materials to wipe away oil, and the removal of contaminated debris, soil and vegetation.
Yet Carl Weimer, executive director of the Pipeline Safety Trust, an organization based in Bellingham, Wash., that promotes education and advocacy and increased access to pipeline information, is convinced that the kind of product being transported through a pipeline is relevant to a cleanup.
Noting the problems that authorities have faced in cleaning up the Michigan oil, he said, “Now that we know this stuff acts differently, their [companies’ cleanup and response] plans really need to be tailored” to what is moving through the pipelines.
Asked about the need for prior release of a pipeline’s oil ingredients, Rep. Tim Griffin, R-Ark., said, “ExxonMobil should go above and beyond what is required by federal regulators and apply lessons learned from the Mayflower spill to ensure the safety and security of the drinking water” for central Arkansans.
Griffin’s 2nd District includes Mayflower and Lake Maumelle.
As for Weimer, he said, the safety organization is not opposed to pipelines. “If they’re in the ground, we just want them to be as safe as possible,” he said.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 10/28/2013