Return of the pipeline

The story is not so much that Central Arkansas Water is concerned about the possible reopening of the Pegasus oil pipeline.

It’s that Central Arkansas Water can’t really do anything except be concerned.

Actually, it can express that concern, which it’s doing, a process all of us could and should be helping if we value good and plentiful water.

This is the 20-inch, 850-mile pipeline from east of St. Louis into Texas that dissects Arkansas from the northwest to the southwest. It erupted under and around a Mayflower subdivision in March 2013.

It left such a crude-oil mess that the pipeline has been inactive since. It’s been sold by ExxonMobil to Energy Transfer Partners LLC, with ExxonMobil remaining a minority partnership.

Now the new owners have notified the appropriate federal regulatory agency, as required—as well as Central Arkansas Water, as a courtesy—that they will begin testing the pipeline in preparation for possible reopening.

Pipelines like Pegasus are regulated entirely federally and by a legally prescribed process that appears to have been expertly lobbied. No public comment is required. All that’s necessary is for the pipeline company to conduct and pass the tests that the federal regulatory process requires.

The testing process runs pressure-measuring devices through the line and takes readings and makes reports.

The pipeline runs through the north side of the watershed of Greater Little Rock’s water source, Lake Maumelle. It crosses the Little Maumelle River and gets within distant sight of the lake a time or two.

Witnesses of admittedly untrained eye tell me that the pipe, some of it aboveground in the watershed, doesn’t look at all reassuring after all these years. Maybe the worn exterior belies the sturdy interior, though it wasn’t sturdy six years ago under Mayflower.

When the Mayflower-contained disaster happened, Central Arkansas Water officials said that a similar rupture of that magnitude just a few miles south in the Maumelle watershed would have been a full catastrophe.

It could have contaminated the main water supply for more than 400,000 customers throughout Greater Little Rock.

The secondary supply, Lake Winona, would meet about 35 percent of the water system’s need.

Most of us need that other 65 percent, or at least find it highly convenient.

Central Arkansas Water’s job is to worry. And it is doing so with sensitivity to the dozen or so smaller water-supply watersheds that the pipeline traverses in Arkansas—or the hundreds that oil pipelines cross throughout the country.

It’s not that Greater Little Rock’s water is more important than anyone else’s. It’s simply the number—400,000 customers, be they governmental, commercial or residential, and the larger number representing all the persons needing water at those customer sites.

Might we insist on rerouting all those routes away from water supplies?

We may as well embark on a project to reroute the federal interstate highway system. You don’t get those easements in a day. You don’t find that money in a lifetime.

Our current federal government is unwilling or unable to address even much easier infrastructural challenges.

A citizens’ lawsuit is a possibility, but only against the license to reopen the pipeline after it has been granted, and only on the technical argument that the project didn’t truly meet all requirements.

The best ongoing option is to ride herd, raise concerns and propose and insist on reasonable safeguards. Perhaps it’s to say, for example, that the Maumelle watershed needs more than the one shutoff valve that it would take a pipeline company official an hour to get to after oil had started spreading. It might be building ditches for redirection of spilled oil, dependent on who designs and pays for them.

We need oil as long as people use motor vehicles that require it. And people around here still seem to be using them at a rate of two to three per household. And the oil we need must be moved from one place to another.

But clean and plentiful water coming out of your kitchen faucet is a more basic human consideration.

Oil flowed through our watershed for decades without our thinking much about it. But we should have been thinking about it, and now, after Mayflower, we assuredly are.

If fretting and public dialogues are the best we can do for now, then, by all means, let’s fret vigorously and keep the dialogue thriving.

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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.