SICK, TIRED: Linda Lynch (left) and son Scott Crow lived through toxic fumes in their neighborhood.
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AUGUST 8, 2013
sense of urgency or specificity about the risks of sticking around the neighborhood. Residents here wish they’d been nudged to decamp for a few days, or been told early on that benzene was being detected at hazardous levels just a few steps from their homes. “The fact they didn’t follow up with neighborhoods, like send one person to a neighborhood and check on people — what the hell,” Lane said. “I don’t understand why they didn’t do that, unless they just didn’t want to cause panic. I’m dumbfounded they haven’t gotten out in the community more.” With no health officials on hand at the church, the people did their best to fill any gaps themselves, by sharing news, passing around photos they’d shot and trying to decipher government pipeline reports. At lunch everyone convened to the church’s food pantry at the back for a potluck lunch. Then they returned to the church to continue comparing notes, and to commiserate. “I think the problem we’ve got is people think because we’re such a small town, we’re just a bunch of hicks who don’t have any God-given sense,” ARKANSAS TIMES
Linda Lynch, a church member who lives across the street, told the room from her pew. “There’s a lot of people who moved here in the last 10 or 15 years who retired like I have, and moved here to get into a smaller community, because I’ve got family who had been here for years. We’re not country hicks. We’re smart people. We’re educated.” Lynch’s voice, forceful, carried in the small vestibule. Her polite, tight cursive on an undated index card pinned to a cork board on the back wall informed parishioners her son Scott’s capital-c Cancer has returned, and asks for prayers. ♦♦♦
T
he Pegasus pipeline runs between Illinois and Texas, over streams, under rivers, through wilds, and under relatively few homes. The fact that it split open underneath a neighborhood would’ve been extraordinarily unlikely if it were a random event. An independent forensic metallurgical report on the faulty stretch of pipe made note of that coincidence, and gave a half-nod to possible causality: “During construction
BRIAN CHILSON
BRIAN CHILSON
Had public officials asked all people living near the oil to consider evacuating for a few days, it might’ve made a big difference for many of the people in the church. Residents have been unable to ask the Arkansas Department of Health directly why there was no contact from them; the state agency has declined invitations to the last four monthly grassroots community meetings. In an email, agency spokesman Ed Barham said that the agency began monitoring air the day of the spill. Only one of the tests around the spill site showed benzene as high as 50 parts per billion, and with the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry the health department “calculated theoretical doses for infants, children and adults at this level for an extended period and determined that this level would not likely result in a longterm health risk,” Barham wrote. At a meeting organized by Unified Command soon after the spill, the department told citizens and the news media that anyone with symptoms should talk to a doctor or call the poison control center. What wasn’t communicated, perhaps despite the health department’s honest efforts, was any
of the homes, the pipeline may have experienced vehicle loadings caused by construction equipment and/or vehicles crossing the pipeline at multiple locations, including over the fractured segment.” All else equal, humans are safer keeping a distance from pipelines, and vice-versa. The reasons for energy infrastructure to be routed away from populated areas are obvious. In the ’60s, for instance, before Arkansas built Lake Maumelle some seven miles southwest of Mayflower, the state insisted Exxon move the Pegasus out of its original path. Now the pipeline merely runs through Maumelle’s watershed — one of 18 drinking water sources it traverses in Arkansas alone. State leaders insist Exxon move the Pegasus even further from the lake before the pipeline is restarted, if indeed it ever is, given that the pipeline’s failure threatens the drinking water source for 400,000 people in and around Little Rock. Because pipelines rarely run under neighborhoods, not a great deal is known about what happens to people when there is a break in one. Scott Crow, Linda Lynch’s son, lives next door
to his mother, across the street from the church on Snuggs Circle. On the day of the spill, when he heard oil was gushing out of the ground in Northwoods, his first thought was that someone had struck it rich. He grabbed a digital camera and tromped through the weeds that cover the pipeline’s easement. It took him five minutes to reach the black swamp. At the time, the smell didn’t alarm him much. “It was like being at the gas station and there being oil on the ground,” he said. “I figured it was probably about as dangerous as that, at the time, because there weren’t announcements coming saying you need to get out of town.” He posted photos to Facebook; news outlets that had been blocked from entering the subdivision picked them up. That night, he said, the smell became overpowering, “like being in a house on fire.” He began developing headaches, nausea. A few days later, he became dizzy while working in his yard and fell to his knees. The first indication that he could be in danger came from strangers writing to him online and saying, hey, you really ought not to breathe that stuff. “Before this I didn’t know the difference between the Keystone XL and a Keystone beer,” Crow said, referring to the controversial gas pipeline many times the size of Pegasus that is proposed to run from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. “It wasn’t something I was studying up on.” Early town meetings weren’t much help. To Crow, it seemed that representatives from the state and from Exxon were more interested in keeping everyone calm than in addressing concerns directly. “Exxon finally, when they showed up, it felt like ‘Red Dawn,’ ” he said. “You felt like your town was being taken over and there wasn’t anything you could do about it. Any questions you asked it was like go back to your house.” At their first meeting with officials, falling as it did so close after the Good Friday pipeline break, residents who attended also got to take home a little Easter basket, courtesy of Exxon, for their troubles. It was mid-April before they got word — official word, via the news — that the pipeline contained known carcinogens and other chemicals that might explain the headaches and dizziness. It was an alarming revelation, not least because Crow had suffered a round of cancer two years earlier that cost him one testicle and left him monitoring a stable mass on the other. Crow and his wife, Barbara Bogard Crow, drove to the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences medical center in Little Rock, they say, where they received two different receptions. Crow told his attending physician that he was worried about how close he was living to the oil spill. He underwent a few tests and emerged with no definitive diagnosis. Barbara, meanwhile, didn’t mention the oil spill. Doctors ran several tests and diagnosed her with bronchitis. Exxon’s claims department paid for that visit for the two of them but hasn’t answered their calls since. (Aaron Stryk, an Exxon spokesman, said in an email that all health claims from Mayflower are handled “on a case-by-case basis” and that “for all valid claims, we have paid all medical expenses.”) CONTINUED ON PAGE 18