By JOAN McCOY
Leader staff writer
The 20-inch pipeline that broke March 29 and spilled Canadian tar sand crude oil into a Mayflower community would have been underneath Lake Maumelle if Little Rock Water, the predecessor of Central Arkansas Water, hadn’t moved it in 1957 when the lake was built.
But the line still runs for 13.5 miles through the Lake Maumelle watershed along a path that includes the northern border of the lake and underneath the Maumelle River and Reece, Yount and Bungle creeks, which feed the lake.
That break is not expected to impact Lake Maumelle, but CAW is concerned about what could happen and will ask ExxonMobil to move its line.
CAW has about 400,000 customers in central Arkansas. It serves Little Rock and North Little Rock, which combined its water departments to form CAW. CAW also provides water to North Pulaski Waterworks and the cities of Jacksonville and Cabot. Two-thirds of the water comes from Lake Maumelle.
Jacksonville buys about 60 percent of its water from CAW while Cabot still gets most of its water from wells and buys about 20 percent from CAW.
John Tynan, CAW watershed protection manager, said Friday that ExxonMobil has been very cooperative with CAW in the past over its concerns about possible contamination of the lake in the event of a break. ExxonMobil has even participated in exercises to test the effectiveness of a risk management plan completed in May 2010.
But the only way to ensure the area’s water supply isn’t contaminated by an oil spill from the line is to move the line out of the 88,000-acre Lake Maumelle watershed, Tynan said. CAW doesn’t expect an immediate affirmative response, he continued.
But what the request will do is get the conversation started between CAW, ExxonMobil and what CAW assumes will be a myriad of agencies required to participate. Until they ask, they won’t know who will have to eventually get involved, Tynan said.
If the water from Lake Maumelle could not be used, Tynan said Lake Winona would supply the system for two or three days under average conditions.
But, he pointed out, a spill of any type in the watershed doesn’t necessarily mean that the water from Lake Maumelle would be unusable. The risk management plan would be initiated at the first sign of trouble.
“As part of this plan, we would contact the appropriate CAW staff and state and local emergency response agencies,” Tynan said. “We would then work to contain the spill as close to the rupture site as possible. Finally, we would begin sampling in the area of the spill, at our intake, and in our treated water to determine what contaminants, if any, were present.”
He continued, “Treatment may or may not be affected by a spill in the watershed, depending on the size of the spill, its transport in the watershed and the proximity to our intake structure.”
Tynan said, “Conventional water treatment used by CAW will remove a limited amount of some materials from the water. Some chemical modifications may be made to improve treatment of oil and associated components, but our treatment facilities are not specifically designed to remove significant amounts of oil and associated compounds,” he said.
