LAKE CONWAY SPARED, CONT.
Main body of Lake Conway
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Highway 89 Inte rsta te 4 0
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response team deployed booms and weirs, floating structures that contain the spread of oil in water. It appears they were successful: Six samples drawn from underwater sediment in Lake Conway just beyond Highway 89 show no evidence of major contamination. The culverts are roughly a mile from where oil poured into the Northwoods subdivision. Several days after the spill, rainfall caused the water level in the cove to rise. Cleanup organizers were forced to pump water from the cove into the lake to prevent it from flooding a nearby neighborhood. Ryan Benefield, deputy director of ADEQ, said this was done only after determining that the oil had been successfully contained farther back in the cove. “We had stopped the progression of oil far from that point and we were testing the water on either side of Highway 89,” Benefield said. “We had repetitive, dozens of booms and surface-to-bottom weirs throughout the cove, and free oil didn’t penetrate past the first couple of booms.” Still, he said, chemicals in the oil may have been carried into the main lake as water was pumped over Highway 89, adding that “water comes in the top of the cove and it goes out into the lake. So, water that had been in the cove when we had free
Northwoods Sudivision, rupture site
oil, we were pumping into the main body of the lake. But we weren’t seeing levels of concern from our testing.” So it seems likely that some amount of the Pegasus oil did flow past Highway 89 and into the lake — the question is just how much. Arkansas Times and its news partner InsideClimate News asked Merv Fingas, a Canadian scientist who has researched and written extensively about oil spill cleanups, to analyze Exxon’s data. “It does not appear that major contamination of the lake occurred,” said Fingas.
“We may never know about minor contamination.” Fingas said the main body of the lake was already “fairly heavily contaminated” with hydrocarbons before the Pegasus spill. The status of Dawson Cove is clearer. Oil sheens continue to appear in surface water, as evidenced by ongoing monitoring reports published by Arcadis, and the sampling data show varying levels of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons present in the soil and sediment of the cove and its surrounding wetlands. These organic compounds,
abbreviated as PAHs, are found in all fossil fuels. They are also formed whenever a flame meets organic matter, so humans create PAHs when they burn wood, smoke tobacco or barbecue meat. “PAHs are the source of the toxicity in oil,” said Jacqueline Michel, an environmental consultant hired by the state Game and Fish Commission with years of experience working on oil spills. “That’s what gets inside gills of fish, inside cells of organisms, and causes disorientation — and if levels are high enough, death.”
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DECEMBER 5, 2013
ARKANSAS TIMES